The News
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has set out on a diplomatic tour of Europe this week, after an anticipated summit of Western leaders was indefinitely postponed after US President Joe Biden said he could not attend due to Hurricane Milton.
Zelenskyy, who had been expected to present his “victory plan” at the gathering, is set to meet with the French, British, German, and Italian leaders, as well as the pope, this week, after meeting with senior officials from a dozen southeastern European countries on Wednesday.
The Ukrainian president has sought to convince allies to loosen restrictions on the use of Western weapons, ramp up support, and invite Ukraine into NATO.
SIGNALS
Allies sense Kyiv is preparing more ‘flexible approach’ to ending war
While Ukrainian officials continue to publicly demand a full withdrawal of Russian troops from their territory, Kyiv’s partners are seeing “a more flexible approach” emerge over how to end the war, Bloomberg reported. Growing concern that Europe’s fiscal constraints and the possibility that Donald Trump could limit US aid have led Kyiv and its allies to start to consider how a negotiated end to the conflict could be reached. There is growing talk of “how this ends and what Ukraine would have to give up in order to get a permanent peace deal,” a European diplomat told the Financial Times, noting such conversations would have been “taboo” just six months ago.
Zelenskyy leads renewed push for NATO membership
Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that a key part of his victory plan is a Ukrainian invitation into NATO, saying this would represent “real steps towards peace.” “Without geopolitical certainty, peace is impossible,” he said in a statement. But European and Western officials told Semafor that a NATO invitation remains unlikely, as Washington and Berlin are still reluctant to invite a country currently at war into the alliance. One European official said “I do not think Biden will move on this,” despite Kyiv’s push for more concrete security guarantees before Trump potentially returns to power. “If the US were to say yes, I cannot say that [Germany’s Chancellor Olaf] Scholz wouldn’t stand alone” against admitting Ukraine, a Western official told Semafor.