As a real war rages on Europe’s eastern edge, the continent’s leaders are distracted by a phony one on its western flank.
With European leaders scrambling here at Davos to persuade Donald Trump to drop his ambition to own Greenland, Ukraine is increasingly being pushed into the background.
That’s prompted Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy to consider whether it’s even worth his while to attend the World Economic Forum, according to a senior Ukrainian official and a foreign adviser familiar with the thinking in Kyiv. Both were granted anonymity to speak freely.
Europe’s leaders had planned to focus on Ukraine this week and to use a scheduled meeting with Trump to secure the U.S. president’s personal endorsement of security guarantees for a post-war Ukraine — measures Kyiv says are necessary to deter the Kremlin from restarting the conflict.
But as diplomatic priorities shift, Kyiv is increasingly at risk of being forgotten, to rising frustration in Ukraine and Europe, while Trump steps up threats to seize mineral-rich Greenland — including the possibility of punitive tariffs on eight European countries that oppose his bid to annex the world’s largest island.
“There’s a real war with the Russians going on in Ukraine,” said Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide. “Greenland is taking energy away from what we should be talking about.”
“It would be a good idea to concentrate on the real war that’s going on, where there are actually Russians that should be fought,” he added.
With Greenland dominating Davos, Ukrainian officials fear their country will end up being forgotten — that in order to resolve the Trump-generated crisis, Europeans will have no choice but to deprioritize the war on their eastern border as the week unfolds.
“We need American and European unity,” said a prominent Ukrainian business leader granted anonymity to speak freely, who attended the gathering to help lobby for more Western support. “We need America and Europe to be together and not at each other’s throats.”
The transatlantic row over Greenland comes at a critical juncture of the war in Ukraine. Russia has been wrecking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with intense missile and drone barrages. And with this winter turning into an exceptionally frigid one — with temperatures dropping below minus 20 degrees Celsius — there’s mounting worry in Kyiv about how the country can persevere without much greater assistance from Western allies, including the United States, when it comes to air defense.
“This winter is different from the three previous wartime ones for several reasons,” said Maxim Timchenko, CEO of Ukrainian energy company DTEK. “With stations and substations continually struck it is getting harder to repair them.”
“They’re firing everything they have to try to destroy the energy infrastructure — ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and all types of drones,” he added. “We only have three or four hours of electricity during the day. And with interruptions in heat supplies, whole apartment blocks have been without heat for a week.”
But with Europe consumed by discussions over Greenland, much of what Ukrainian officials came to Davos to explain and request is being drowned out by rising fears over the future of the U.S.-led security arrangement that has kept Europe safe since the end of World War II.
Likewise, Trump officials have been largely focused on Greenland — and Gaza — and Zelenskyy has struggled to nail down a scheduled slot for a bilateral meeting with Trump, according to Ukrainian officials.
According to a Republican foreign policy expert, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly, Zelenskyy is keen on a face-to-face meeting but has encountered reluctance from the White House. “Zelenskyy would always meet with Trump as he thinks the benefits outweigh the costs, and that if he isn’t engaging with him others are,” he told POLITICO.
Ukrainian and U.S. officials are expected to continue a dialogue at Davos but there are now only vague plans for signing an economic reconstruction deal between the U.S. and Kyiv that had been slated to be inked this week.
Trump’s increasingly bellicose language — including his declaration this week that he no longer feels obliged to think “purely of Peace” and his refusal to rule out seizing Greenland by force — has fueled European panic ahead of his address to the World Economic Forum on Wednesday. His audience will include 64 other heads of state or government.
“We don’t think the future that might unfold, after all the talks and threats that we’ve heard over the course of the past days, that’s it especially bright for any one of us,” Finland’s foreign minister, Elina Valtonen, told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast.
But, she added, “I would really hope that we could return to discussing how to end the [Ukraine] war as soon as possible.”
Via Politico
