EU leaders miss their chance to strengthen Ukraine — just as Trump finally shows up 

BRUSSELS — It takes two minutes to drive from the Europa building, the futuristic headquarters of the European Council, to the office of the Belgian prime minister in Brussels. 

The question EU diplomats are privately asking is whether anyone running this week’s leaders’ summit bothered to make that short trip down Rue de la Loi to find out what Bart De Wever was really thinking. 

De Wever, who has been Belgium’s prime minister only since February, derailed EU plans to raid frozen Russian assets and release a vital loan of €140 billion that would help fund Kyiv for the next two years. 

His opposition to the plan — based on fears that Vladimir Putin would retaliate against Belgium — means EU leaders will now have to come back to the question of how to help meet Ukraine’s cash shortfall in December, if they don’t call an emergency gathering sooner.

“It’s a mess,” one diplomat said, granted anonymity like others to speak freely. “This was not how it was meant to play out.” 

Belgium’s opposition took EU diplomats and ministers, as well as top officials working for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, by surprise: Her team had spent days telling colleagues they had found a fix for De Wever’s concerns. 

But it was the European Council President António Costa who arguably had the biggest portion of egg on his face.

“Today in this European Council we will take the political decision to ensure the financial needs of Ukraine for 2026 and 2027, including for acquisition of military equipment,” Costa told Zelenskyy as they entered the summit together on Thursday morning. “And this is a very strong message to Russia,” he said. “We said repeatedly that we will support Ukraine as long as necessary and whatever it takes. And now we have concretized this.”

The EU’s traditional bad boy, Viktor Orbán, helped the rest of the leaders make progress by staying away from the gathering for most of the day and then keeping out of the discussions on Ukraine. | Marie Odgaard/EPA

At a late night press conference at the end of the gathering, Costa and von der Leyen were reduced to trying to explain what had happened — and what the now vaguely worded final summit conclusions actually meant.

Diplomats were also unsure. Gone was any explicit mention of using the immobilized assets to finance a “reparations loan” for Ukraine, alongside the proposals for allaying Belgium’s concerns. Was the whole plan dead? They insisted it was not.

But nobody could say for sure when, if ever, the EU will agree to using the frozen state assets of Russia to help Kyiv finance its defense. 

‘Tremendous sanctions’

It could have been very different.

In fact, before the discussion over assets went awry, the mood among Ukraine’s allies had been buoyant. The EU had passed its 19th package of sanctions against Russia, hitting Putin’s shadow fleet of oil tankers, banking and energy sectors. 

And Donald Trump, for the first time, finally took action against Moscow, slapping what he called “tremendous sanctions” on Russia’s biggest oil firms. He had run out of patience after months of talks about peace with Putin that he said “just don’t go anywhere.” 

Privately and publicly, at the start of Thursday’s summit, senior officials in Europe were delighted with Trump’s move. “It’s been a week of ups and downs but at the moment we are in a pretty good place,” one adviser said in the morning. 

The EU’s traditional bad boy, Viktor Orbán, helped the rest of the leaders make progress by staying away from the gathering for most of the day and then keeping out of the discussions on Ukraine. He doesn’t believe Europe should be fighting someone else’s war but has lately taken a view that he doesn’t want to go to war with the EU too much either. 

After sometimes tense discussions, leaders even managed to agree to the summit conclusions on the bloc’s climate targets, without a fatal breakdown. The final text stopped short of endorsing the 2040 emissions reduction target and left key decisions for a later date. 

It was, one diplomat said, a “classic” EU outcome, with “everyone equally unhappy.” 

But by 11 p.m. the attention had switched back to Ukraine and the autopsy of the plan that Belgium had strangled.

The long haul

French President Emmanuel Macron said the plan for using the assets to create a loan to Kyiv was not dead. “It hasn’t been buried, we were able to discuss technical details,” he told reporters. “We need to progress with method, because we can’t do anything that breaks international law.”

French President Emmanuel Macron said the plan for using the assets to create a loan to Kyiv was not dead. | Dursun Aydemir/Getty Images

Von der Leyen tried to put a brave face on the outcome and argued that the EU would remain a staunch ally for Kyiv. “We are in for the long haul,” she explained. Ukraine, however, says it needs the money early next year. 

Many of the EU’s leaders will meet again on Friday with Zelenskyy and the U.K.’s Keir Starmer as part of the coalition of the willing to support peace efforts. Zelenskyy will be hoping they have more success. 

“After our sanctions, and Trump’s sanctions, the reparations loan should have made this a really good day,” one EU diplomat said. “But it’s an opportunity we’ve missed.”