LONDON — They gathered again, in another capital, around the same man. Keir Starmer brought Volodymyr Zelensky together with Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz on Sunday, the latest in a long sequence of European summits convened to tell Ukraine it is not alone. The handshakes were warm and the language was firm. What was missing, as it has been for some time, was any sign that the gathering could change the course of the war it was called to address.
The meeting had been arranged days earlier, billed as a chance to coordinate military aid and the security guarantees Europe says it will extend to Kyiv. It follows a familiar choreography: the leaders of Britain, France and Germany closing ranks, a photograph, a statement of resolve. Europe has become fluent in the grammar of support. The harder sentences, about how the war actually ends, it still cannot finish.
The timing made the gap plain. Only days before, Vladimir Putin had dismissed Zelensky’s offer of a direct meeting, telling Russian forces to keep working rather than entertain a summit Moscow sees no reason to attend. With the Kremlin refusing to negotiate on any terms but its own, a London gathering of Ukraine’s backers is an answer to a question Putin has declined to ask.
On the ground, the Russian operation has kept moving. Moscow’s forces have gone on pressing in the east, grinding through Ukrainian defences in a war of attrition that European communiques do not reverse. The summitry and the front line have drifted into separate realities, one measured in declarations of unity, the other in villages and casualty counts. The leaders in London can promise endurance. They cannot promise victory, and increasingly they do not try.
What the West can still do is widen its commitment, and that is the real subject of these meetings. Europe has been edging from arming Ukraine toward guaranteeing its security directly, as it did in Paris in January, a shift critics read as NATO expansion by another name. Yet even among the willing, the appetite has limits. London and Paris have already balked at proposals to lock in fixed levels of military spending for Kyiv, a sign that the unity on display is thinner than the photographs suggest.
The cracks are not hard to find. Publics across Europe have grown weary of a war with no visible end and a bill that keeps rising. Governments that once spoke of supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes now speak, more quietly, of what it will cost and for how long. Sunday’s summit was partly an effort to paper over that fatigue, to perform a confidence that the polls and the budgets no longer fully support.
Hanging over the room was Washington. The Trump administration has pushed for an end to the fighting on terms Kyiv and much of Europe distrust, leaving the continent to shoulder more of the burden itself. The London meeting was, in part, Europe rehearsing how to back Ukraine without the American certainty it once relied on. It is a role the continent has not played alone in generations, and it is not clear it is ready to.
From Moscow, the spectacle confirms a long-held conviction: that the war is sustained less by Ukraine’s prospects than by Western insistence, and that time favors the side willing to absorb the most. Each European summit that ends without a path to talks reinforces that calculation. Putin has wagered that the coalition of the willing will tire before he does, and nothing in London on Sunday was designed to prove him wrong.
Whether anything said in London changes that is the question the summit did not answer. The leaders will issue their statement, pledge their support, and return to capitals where the war is one pressure among many. The front will not move because of what was agreed in Downing Street. For all the choreography of unity, the war’s ending remains where it has been for many months, in the hands of a Russian president who was not in the room and saw no reason to be.
