COPENHAGEN — The EU’s age-old problem of choosing to talk about a crisis instead of resolving it came back to haunt it on Wednesday. Even with Europe assailed by drones, warplanes and hybrid attacks, a summit descended into familiar stalemate.
Leaders spoke a lot: The scheduled two hours on “defense” ended up taking twice that time. But that was not indicative of a breakthrough. To the Danish hosts’ surprise, all the assembled presidents and prime ministers wanted to have a say, and many moved beyond their prepared statements, according to three officials briefed on the behind-closed-doors discussion.
The reality of the summit room, in the serene surroundings of Copenhagen’s Christiansborg Palace, a castle that can trace its roots to 1167, was in stark contrast to the increasingly urgent tone of Europe’s leadership.
“We are in a confrontation with Russia,” French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters. For Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo it’s close to “a hybrid war.” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said: “We see Russia clearly escalating.” “The war in Ukraine is a Russian attempt to threaten all of us,” said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
And yet …
While the summit was billed as a speedy get-together to agree on the broad scope of the bloc’s unprecedented additional military capabilities and extra support for Ukraine, little of substance emerged. The gathering was the EU’s first among 27 leaders since June but even though they ran beyond their scheduled time, most of the key questions remained unanswered.
Enemy drones
The broader questions of how to bring about peace in Ukraine will need the support of powers beyond the EU, but leaders say they are determined to bolster the bloc’s defenses in the meantime.
Among the proposals up for debate were the creation of a “drone wall” that would establish a network to detect and shoot down enemy drones in response to incursions in Polish and Romanian airspace, an idea to use €140 billion of Russian assets frozen in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 to send to Kyiv, and changing EU rules to allow Ukraine’s membership application to proceed despite objections from Hungary.
In practice, there was little progress on any of those issues, according to the officials with knowledge of the leaders’ discussions.
What’s more, it is not clear that any of those plans will be ready to be signed off when the 27 leaders next meet in Brussels at the end of October. Questions still hang over each of the policies and there was insufficient time to work through them, said the three diplomats and officials.
European Council President António Costa, who chaired the meeting, said that the session had been urgently needed “to prepare decisions for the security of our continent” and that leaders needed be ready to agree them in just three weeks.
Officials immediately played down the chances of the summit ever leading to concrete results. “There was never an expectation there would be a decision on these things overnight — they are complex issues that touch on national sovereignty,” said a fourth official briefed on the leaders’ discussions.
‘They are testing us’
However, the indecision stood in stark contrast to the threat. Even as leaders debated the issue, Germany — whose chancellor, Friedrich Merz, lambasted the drone wall in the room — was forced to confirm that drone sightings had been reported over its own critical infrastructure.
A second part on the agenda focusing on support for Ukraine was delayed and squeezed into just one final hour.
Costa was due to present much-vaunted plans, first reported by POLITICO, to streamline EU rules to speed up Kyiv’s accession process and circumvent Hungarian Prime Minister’s Viktor Orbán’s veto. The push barely had time to be mentioned, two of the officials said — though Orbán found time to blast it anyway.
“We meet at a time in which Russia has intensified its attacks in Ukraine,” Denmark’s Frederiksen told reporters after the summit. “They are threatening us, and they are testing us, and they will not stop.”
But the challenge on Thursday morning remains the same as it did 24 hours earlier. “Now it is up to us to deliver,” she said.