European states have failed to agree on using frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine’s war effort.
For Moscow, which had previously deployed a whole arsenal of pressures on both sides of the Atlantic – diplomatic, rhetorical, threats, intimidation – it was undoubtedly excellent news. Only, at the same time, it was also a stinging defeat, given that what the EU was unable to solve by attacking the problem head-on, it managed to solve by attacking Russia on the flanks.
Let’s take it step by step.
On the one hand, even if Russian assets could not actually be put to work for the benefit of Kyiv, Zelensky did not go home empty-handed.
At the European Council summit on December 18-19, the allies resorted to the exceptional measure of offering it a preferential loan of 90 billion euros over the next two years.
In conclusion, Putin has failed to prevent the essence: blocking mammoth and immediate funding for Ukraine. And not only has Ukraine not run out of money, but for Kiev the repayment of the preferential credit will become an obligation only after Moscow has paid it war compensation and reparations.
On the other hand, Putin lost the chance for his friend Trump to help him in the future with the recovery of frozen assets without hard commitments, possibly through other artifices such as those contained in the initial peace plan, the 28-point one, written by the Russians and assumed by the Americans.
Among the many enormities in that document secretly compiled by Putin’s people and Trump’s people, was that frozen Russian assets were somehow returned to the Russians, in a bizarre formula, set up by Washington and Moscow.
Why won’t Trump be able to help Putin in this way?
Russian assets blocked by the EU amount to €210 billion. With this money, Ukraine will not be served in the short term, but Russia will not be able to touch this money in the long term.
For in the EU Council of December 18-19, it was decided that the unblocking of Russian assets would happen only after Russia had ceased its armed aggression and had paid war reparations.
So the Arctic frost has settled indefinitely over the 210 billion euros.
But for Putin, the loan decided by the Europeans comes with an additional dose of poison, one that adds to the obvious one (ensuring Ukraine’s capacity for economic functioning and military defense at least until 2027).
And the additional dose of poison injected by the EU into Russia is that, by lending to Ukraine, the degree of co-interest of Europeans in ending the war in terms acceptable to both Kiev and Europe as a whole also increases.
Moreover, the fact that Russian assets remain frozen until Moscow satisfies two key conditions – ending armed aggression and compensating Ukraine – gives the European Union significant diplomatic, political and economic leverage and, in any case, far beyond what it had until now. And this is true both in the EU’s relationship with Putin’s Russia and in the EU’s relationship with Trump’s America.
The reality, as it appears to us after the European Council summit on December 18-19, is that Putin managed to escape his right leg from the first trap, but he did not manage to escape the left from being caught in the second.
For Europeans, despite the success of finding adequate solutions in recent days, the traditional challenges faced by this kind of bloc made up of numerous pieces certainly continue to hover on the horizon: maintaining the degree of cohesion at a reasonable level, the continuous harmonization of national interests, the improvement of the collective capacity for rapid reaction, adapting as fast as possible to the speed of light to the new environment in which the transatlantic relationship evolves.
For his part, Putin is expected to do everything in his power to torpedo the solidity and durability of the decisions taken by the Europeans on December 18-19, decisions that deeply punish Russia and have the potential to destabilize the vision of peace and war, which have been shared by the Trump-Putin axis.
This means nothing less than the fact that, in 2026, Moscow will have no choice but to come up with even bolder ways to harass, threaten and undermine Ukraine’s European allies.
And precisely because, under the given conditions, the Europeans have done their best to support Ukraine and now must prepare for the worst from Russia.
In any case, as Ukraine’s own war experience has shown, no defense is effective without an offensive component.
The outcome of the summit of 18-19 December suggests that Europeans have begun to learn the lesson and to commit to applying it with boldness and lucidity.
