Is Europe ready to defend itself? - with Nicu Popescu
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Trump made Europe lonely. Europe feels abandoned and perplexed in its geopolitical solitude. What it does not yet fully understand, though, is how insecure it has become and how it should now learn from Ukraine and not only teach it. Only if Europe understands that Ukraine is not its problem but part of its solution and that defending Ukraine means defending Europe, both will survive. You're listening to the Explain Ukraine podcast.

Explain Ukraine is a podcast by Ukraine World, a multilingual media outlet about Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Yarmolenko. I'm a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. My guest today is Niko Popescu, former vice prime minister of Moldova and currently a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Ukraine.resisting.gmail.com

You can find these links in the description of this episode. So let's begin. Niko Popescu, welcome to this podcast. It's very good to have this opportunity to talk to you, Volodymyr. Yeah, so we know each other for a very long time, but...

We kind of are fighting for this recognition of the right of Eastern Europe to exist, of Moldova and Ukraine and Georgia and other places, wonderful places. Right now we are in a difficult situation when we don't know what is the policy of Trump administration. And one of the alternatives is that Trump will cut its assistance to Ukraine, including military assistance.

And there were statements by European top officials that they are ready to replace the America in this respect. But do you think it's realistic? Speaking of how long we know each other, I think it's since 2002, which makes it more than 20 years. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Gives you some perspective of how much things changed since then. Both are better and a lot of them have changed for worse. Listen, looking at Trump...

and the new US presidential administration. I have, it's not my way, but I prefer to think about it in two ways. One, there is a set of personalities. There is Donald Trump himself. There are people around him, advisors. But there's also a

a much bigger phenomenon, which you can call it MAGA, you can call it the New Republican Party, which is probably something that is more substantial than just one person. So that is why I think there's a wider tendency in American society that projects onto American politics, but also in Europe we have the same phenomenon in quite a lot of countries.

And that's why it's important to also, when we look at what happens in Ukraine, the American approach towards Ukraine is not to be too focused maybe on personalities. Now with this specific what next in the US policy towards Ukraine, I think things can look... It's a moment now when things are a bit confusing.

People have been, of course, naturally extrapolating from Trump's statements a year ago, six months ago, expecting to see what he would do. And then you have completely new subjects being thrown into the conversation. Greenland, Gaza now, and all of these subjects, they also do impact a lot of things. They have an impact on the American-European relationship, on the American-Danish relationship.

on how substantially can Europe try and talk to Trump about Ukraine. So there's now really a moment of maximum confusion, maximum lack of clarity. And I think it will take quite some time until the dust settles and we will know whether what we think now is actually too pessimistic or too optimistic. But look, what interested me is at this moment of our conversation is not America. What interested me is Europe.

And I have the impression, let me give you my kind of idea what is happening. There is some change in the way how Europeans perceived Eastern Europe. There is a huge difference compared to when we met each other in Budapest in 2002. At that time there was an understanding that, well, that is kind of a non-European Europe somewhere, like maybe semi-Asian Europe, and it's definitely under the aegis of Russia.

Now it's changed. I have the impression that both political elites and public opinion has embraced the idea that, for example, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus after 2020, I mean, in the best form of Belarusian society, Georgia are part of Europe. Not all the governments, of course, think like that.

But then nobody knows what to do with this because there is still no political will and public opinion behind it to understand that this is Europe's war, that this is Russia's attack on Georgia, then on Ukraine. It's an attack on Europe. It's a willingness to divide Europe again. And then as there is kind of this understanding, but this only half understanding,

the process of moving everything towards the goal that we need to defend Europe and primarily moving the military industrial complex, moving the arms production is not happening. What is your opinion? I think I'll start with your good side of your formulation and your question. It's true that in the last 20 plus years, Europe shrank in terms of being smaller, in terms of people feeling closer to each other.

You still remember how difficult it was to travel 15 years ago, 20 years ago. You had to queue for visas. Sometimes you would get visas for three days, for five days. You had to prove bookings, hotels, assurances. All of that is gone now. It's gone institutionally. You no longer have visas. People travel. There have been low-cost airlines before, of course, the war in Ukraine led to the closure of the Ukrainian airspace. But basically, people travel much more. They

they visit each other and that's not just reflected in public policies. Also on a human level Italians, Spaniards, French feel much more that Ukrainians, Moldovan Georgians are Europeans. Even 15 years ago or 12 years ago there was this concern: "Okay, when you have visa-free with Ukraine what's gonna happen?" Well, nothing happened. No one thinks it's a problem for Europe, whereas

Until 2014, a lot of people were concerned that if you do visa-free with Ukraine or Georgia or Moldova, you're going to get a problem. And it's not a problem. Even countries with very strong anti-immigration sentiment, be it Austria or others, they don't mind having visa-free with a country like Ukraine.

And we've seen it, of course, with the refugees where a number of this tragic number of a huge number of Ukrainian refugees in Europe has not generated xenophobic backlashes in any significant scale. So, yes, culturally, personally and not just politically, we are much more part of the European mainstream. On the negative side is we have the war.

It's not just the war, it's a culmination of war coming back through basically salami tactics, step by step into the realities of today. You had the war in Georgia in 2008, annexation of Crimea and the attacks and the infiltration of Donbass and the Russians infiltrating and destabilizing and turning Donbass into a war zone in 2014.

You have the large-scale invasion in '22, you have constant hybrid war on a lot of European countries: Moldova, Georgia, but also France, Spain, the UK, you have cyber attacks, you have all of the series of sabotage attacks, cables being cut.

you know, railways exploding in France, attempts to kill people in Germany, etc. So you have a lot of really aggressive, not just disinformation operations happening against a lot of you. And this brutalization is, of course, it's a really negative trend. It's probably not, has not reached its peak. Things will probably get worse.

And this is where the conversation about the United States comes into the picture because Europe is completely unprepared to this. Some governments and some countries are more prepared, some countries are less prepared, but as a whole, the European public probably lives in a Europe that we lost, that we no longer have.

Europe, where a mix between hybrid war and large-scale brutal war in Ukraine is part of the reality, but the public opinions of a lot of most European countries still have to catch up with what this means for them.

How quickly Europe can change itself? I remember we were talking last year in Madrid and on ECFR, in your annual meeting, European Council on Foreign Relations, and your point is that, I love this joke very much, that if

If the landing by the Elias during the Second World War was happening according to the current European procurement norms, it would happen probably in 1450. So it would take much longer time.

And your point was that procedures during peacetime and procedures during wartime should be completely different. And the way how you think during wartime, you need to be much faster, you need to have much faster procurement, you need to work much faster with your military industries. And this is all not happening. Maybe things have changed in half a year, but can you tell me more about this? Indeed, what...

I think it's quite frustrating to a lot of people, of course in Ukraine, of course in Moldova, but across Europe as a whole. And we see this discourse coming up also in America, is that our modern public administrations have become extremely slow. People want faster results. Now, when you live in peacetime, economic growth, it's good if it's fast, but if it's slow, it's not the end of the world. That's a bit the reality of Europe. But if you're in a crisis, if you're in a war,

If you're in a large-scale crisis, be it COVID or the war against Ukraine, which is generating a lot of negative effects on Ukraine primarily, but also on a lot of other things, on gas supplies, on electricity supplies in Ukraine, in Poland, in Central Europe, you need to be able to have fast solutions to this problem. So

Partly as a result of his concern, a few months ago I published a paper with Laurence Boone, who was a Europe minister in France until about a year ago, calling for special procedures to develop infrastructure in times of large-scale crisis or wars.

And the parallel, and we call this, the paper is called Better Firefighting. And the parallel being that you have normal traffic on the road, you have cars, but sometimes you need cars with sirens. Cars that, you know, you press the button, the siren goes off, and then doctors, firefighters, or policemen, or policewomen can get to the place where something bad is happening much quicker than normal traffic allows.

If they do not get in time or if they do not get quickly enough to the place where there's an accident or incident, people die. People can die either because the fire becomes bigger or because, you know, a killing happens or because a sick person who was waiting an ambulance did not receive, you know, did not have the ambulance in time.

Except that the same is true also for large-scale public sector situations. And one of the most visible situations is, of course, the situation with electricity in Ukraine. Russia has been deliberately bombarding, systematically bombarding the Ukrainian electricity infrastructure. It has destroyed a lot of that infrastructure.

Ukraine very quickly went from being an exporter of electricity until September 22. So six months into the war, Ukraine was still exporting electricity. And today, Ukraine is an importer of electricity. Yet, there hasn't been a single new electricity interconnector built into Ukraine three years after the war. There are some projects in Romania, in Poland, they are happening, but it hasn't been built.

And a lot of these projects are not necessarily that complicated, they are not necessarily that expensive, but they go on peacetime procedures. So you basically see that the European administrations, and that includes the European Union institutions, national governments, development banks, they don't necessarily have procedures that allow you to do things fast. And this is where the parallel with the 40s have...

Now, we raise this somewhat provocative question. Imagine that in order to prepare the Normandy landing in 1944, the UK government and the American government would have used today's public acquisition procedures in order to buy landing boats or trucks. I'm not even talking about military equipment. I'm all talking about technically civilian stuff.

What if they used today's public acquisition procedures to buy everything you needed to prepare the Normandy landing, from food to trucks to tires for trucks? When would that landing happen? This is a bit the concern. And then, of course, you have this concern running into a lot of

public debates. The European Union had this last year in 2024, three strategic reports on how to make Europe better. You had this report written by Enrique Leta, by Mario Draghi, another report, and by Niinisto, a former Finnish president, and all of them said that Europe needs to be faster.

you have this concern also in the United States where there's a strong call on the US administration to be faster. And this is where I think that we need to think through on how can we do things much faster, not least in terms of supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainians to resist, because that resistance is not just about defending international law,

dissuading future aggression, that resistance also defends Europe from higher risks. And that is why Europe needs to be much faster at helping Ukraine and by doing so strengthen its own security as well, not just help Ukraine, which it should totally do.

I think even the framing, we talked with you about it, the framing, the word helping Ukraine is not right. I mean, Europe is helping Europe, is helping yourself while it is helping Ukraine, right? Therefore, I'm fighting all the time against these phrases, Ukraine war. Sometimes people are saying Ukraine's war, as if Ukraine is fighting against itself.

Indeed. I was just reading in the last couple of weeks, I finished this book yesterday. It's a book published in 1944 by Edward Stetinius, who was the administrator of the Land Lease. And he describes a lot of very interesting and fascinating things about how Land Lease was set up and it's this mechanism through which the United States helped the Europeans, primarily the UK, but also the Soviet Union and China, etc.

with equipment to defeat Nazi Germany. So he describes how before Lend-Lease was launched, in America you had a debate in the Congress between two types of people making two types of arguments. So one was organized around a committee called America First Committee. And people in 1940 in the America First Committee were saying that what happens in Europe should not be of a huge concern to the United States.

because this is far, this is not going to affect the United States. And even if there's a, you know, dictatorial power controlling all of Europe, the US is defended well enough by the ocean. And then they should not support the UK or the Soviets or the Chinese in fighting. And when the other committee arguing for greater support for those nations that were fighting Nazi Germany, you know, what was its name? It was not called NATO.

help to the UK or help to Russia or the Soviet Union or France. It was called Defend America by Aiding Allies Committee. And already linguistically, you had a situation where people at the time realized that it's not about helping Churchill or the United Kingdom. It is about defending America by helping another country keep America.

a threatening military, an aggressive imperialist military as far away from American borders, from the sea lanes. And this is where

I think that is not how the debate was framed in the last three years. People spoke a lot about support for Ukraine, help Ukraine, help Ukrainian refugees, help the Ukrainian electricity sector. But this idea that if Ukraine falls, then all of Europe is in danger has not really trickled down in a lot of countries.

And that is part of the problem, I think, as to why we have also seen more and more political parties being less supportive of the help to Ukraine, because this link between Ukraine's survival, Ukraine's resilience, Ukraine's capacity to resist, and the future of NATO, of the European Union, has not been automatically established in the debate. And that is also reflected, I think, in public opinion. I think it's even reflected in...

in the way how our friends think sometimes, because how our allies think sometimes, because I have the impression that, well, the key focus is still made how we protect the eastern flank of NATO, how we protect the eastern flank of EU, rather than how we really ensure that Ukraine keeps its sovereignty. Let me ask you a question. How realistic do you think that Russia will attack the NATO member states like the Baltic states, Poland?

Poland, Finland, Romania, Bulgaria? It partly depends on how successful Russia is in Ukraine. If Russia is successful in Ukraine, well, I mean, there's multiple definitions of what that means, but I think the danger for other countries will be significant.

It's also, I think, there's a very high risk. There is a lot of conversation in Europe, in the United States. There's a hope, there's an expectation that Donald Trump came and he'll deliver a deal. And that expectation you see very present in a lot of countries, in a lot of political forces.

What you don't necessarily see very widely is an understanding that depending on how this war ends, and I'm not sure it will end in 2025, it might, but we don't know. But depending on how this war ends or the way this war will end, will have an impact, a very high impact on whether there would be another war after that. And the chances that a bad peace will lead very quickly to a new war, I think, are quite high.

And that next war, it could take place in Ukraine, but it could take place in other places as well. It could involve also NATO or European Union territory. But look, if we look, there should be no just hypothetical thinking. There is empirical thinking back in history, right? Russia, the outcome of the war in Transnistria that is closest to you and you know very well,

was that Russia says, okay, I got a control over part of the sovereign country territory and nothing was applied to me, right? The same results in the war, with the war in Georgia 2008, the same results in annexation of Crimea, etc. And

Each time the scale of the conflict was bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and the territory of the conflict was bigger and bigger. And yeah, I completely agree that if we have a deal and suspension of the war for one year, two years, but then Russia says, well, my strategy was successful. I got a...

I got the territory, I got sanctions, but okay, I went through it, I will recover from it and I will start another war. Yes, I think this is a very risky future and it might happen. And a lot of people today have a responsibility to focus on, you know, getting peace back to Ukraine and to Europe, but also on thinking how that peace works.

will diminish the risk of the next war which might be even worse than this one i totally agree also you you're saying that a lot of europeans don't necessarily feel threatened and they don't feel that this is their war and that is something which of course we all see and i think part of that is because people look at there's a big nato there's a big european union it's

Together, they are like hundreds of millions of people. They look at military budgets and they say, how would anyone dare attack an organization like NATO? Because NATO is so big. NATO has so many troops, so much defense spending, which is one way to look at it. But the risk is not that someone will hope that they can militarily defeat NATO. But you might have a situation where an adversary of NATO might make the calculation that if they attack

and take and capture one village on NATO territory, that NATO will not activate Article 5. And by not activating Article 5, or in the case of the European Union, Article 42.7 of the Treaty on the European Union, which also provides a mutual defense clause, and that if you basically touch NATO or European Union territory,

and there is no proper reaction to that, then both organizations kind of politically disintegrate. On paper they exist, but they are no longer credible. So this is more of a risk than a big NATO-Russia war. It's more a calculation that you can touch NATO territory and Article 5 will not be activated, and then the whole institutional infrastructure of post-World War II Europe kind of crumbles.

which gives you a completely different political map of Europe. I don't think it will happen, but you cannot ignore this risk. Look, it's already partially happened because the...

the fragments of the Russian missiles and Russian drones already fell on EU NATO territories in Poland, in Romania, in other countries. But I will continue your thought because everything today is not just material things going on the front line. It's not about geopolitics, it's about psychopolitics, it's about psychology in politics, right?

Because look at the map of Russia advances in Ukraine. Everybody is saying that Ukraine is tired and Russia advances. But Russians seized only two small cities last year. Mostly they were seizing villages. Ukrainians were quite successful in Kursk region.

But things are going on psychologically. And psychologically, everybody is persuaded that Russia is winning this war. While I think the key thing is...

what you believe in. Do you really believe that Russia is winning this war or Ukraine is winning this war? The same with NATO. I mean, it might take one week for Russians to enter, you know, Baltic states and capture some territories. And the current wars, if you look at them, for example, Ukraine, the most of the territories that Russia now controls are a result of a blitzkrieg, very quick action in the first week of the war. Ukrainians took...

entered the Kursk Oblast and are still there already almost half a year have passed. It was also a result of Blitzkrieg. So the reality is that it's very difficult to regain territory once you lost it because this is the nature of this war. You can really secure your territory very quickly. And that week, even if the Article 5 is activated, but it's activated one week after these consultations,

Yeah, you already have part of the NATO or EU territory occupied. This is where I think NATO and the EU are in danger territory. The danger is not that Lisbon will be occupied. That's not the danger for a country like Portugal or for a country like Spain or even France. The danger is that because...

of some relatively small geographic action, let's put it this way, in Eastern Europe, the architecture that kept Europe peaceful and democratic for the last 80 years will crumble. This is where the danger is not just for Ukraine, not just for Lithuania, not just for Finland, but also for Portugal and Madrid. And this conversation is not necessarily happening yet.

Another, if you allow me to pick up another issue that you hear today, is of course we have this ridiculous hope and illusion that the solution to this is a neutral Ukraine. And the reason I have the right to call it, and you know that a lot of people in the United States, in Europe, think that...

If only Ukraine would have been neutral, this thing would not have happened. But we are neutral. Ukraine has been neutral, non-aligned until 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and attacked Donbass. But then I also have the kind of very legitimate right to call it ridiculous because Moldova has been neutral since 1994. Moldova adopted the constitution where it's written neutrality.

Yet it hasn't solved a single issue in Moldovan-Russian relations. Russia continued keeping its illegal troops in the Transnistrian region, continued supporting separatism, and year by year has been increasing pressure on Moldova, in the energy sphere, energy blackmail, disinformation attacks, illegal party finance, continued support for separatism, embargoes on wine, on this, on that.

Luckily for Moldova, Moldova is relatively far geographically from Russia because we have Ukraine in between. So in this sense, Moldova has much more

more geographical comfort than a country like Georgia or Belarus or Ukraine had, because we don't have a common border with Russia. And that, of course, limited Russia's capacity to do even more aggressive things vis-a-vis Moldova. But it's very clear that at no point did Russia say, OK, Moldova is neutral. Moldova doesn't want to join NATO. Let's be happy with it and leave the Moldovans build the kind of state they want to build. No, Russia has never done this. Russia has been pursuing assertive,

ways to try to gain more influence in Moldova. And just in the last month, we've had a situation with Russia, contrary to its contractual obligations, cut gas supplies into

the Transnistrian region of Moldova, which generated a new energy slash electricity crisis for Moldova. Moldova has weathered it out reasonably well. The European Union stepped in to help. But nonetheless, you constantly see aggressive intent against a country that is neutral.

Well, people who are saying about Ukraine being neutral are thinking about this Finland example after the Second World War. Or we might say Austria example. But what they forget is that this was the result of the whole bunch of arrangements which...

Which is a result of the end of this big war. So the dynamics after the Second World War was not how to start a new war, but how to rather avoid a new war and how to secure what...

what both the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc had. And therefore, basically, the result of it, the dream of the Soviets was to go to this 1975 Helsinki Final Act, who basically de facto secured their control over the Baltics and de facto borders. While the analogy should be that after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, we received a bunch of nation states in Central Europe, which were extremely fragile.

You had more or less strong Poland, you had the democratic but less strong Czechoslovakia. And then some bright minds at that time were saying, look, sooner or later there will be the clash of new empires, the Germanic and Soviet one. And this was what happened.

And even more so because people focus on Finland as a, let's call it a successful case of neutrality, but also Sweden. Sweden has been neutral for 215 years since 1809 until last year, until 2024. It's been neutral for 215 years.

So people look, oh, Sweden, Finland, they were neutral. How great. Well, it's true. It worked well. Even they gave up neutrality. But we know Belgium was neutral for about 100 years, maybe more. Belgian neutrality did not help. Belgian neutrality was used by the Nazis to control most of continental Europe by invading France through Belgium. We have a case of neutrality of Luxembourg. It didn't work that well.

We have another neutral case, Cyprus. Well, technically Cyprus is neutral, but I think pretty much everyone knows that Cyprus gets quite a lot of military assistance from a NATO country called Greece. And that, you know, Cypriot neutrality has a lot of, you know, much bigger supporters than just Cypriot capabilities would do. So,

Neutrality as a small, alone, single country in a dangerous environment has not been such an unmitigated success. Even if someone is a big fan of Finland, I think the cases that show that... Another case, Belarus. Belarus was not exactly neutral.

But by the looks of it, it did not plan to participate in a military aggression against Ukraine. Yet it had no choice. Belarus was used by Russia as a launching pad for a military aggression against a country that Belarus did not necessarily want to attack. And this is where you get a case of a country that is not exactly neutral but has been dragged into an aggression and into a war against another country.

Yes, because this is a security void. And in a situation when the geopolitical landscape is moving, I mean, when you have a force that wants to move the geopolitical landscape, being neutral really doesn't help. It's an invitation for the invasion. And this is remarkable how there are different readings of what happened in April 2008 at Bucharest. It was April, right? Bucharest NATO Summit. Yeah.

So my reading and I think it's probably your reading but let me ask you about it is that at that time Ukraine and Georgia were really hoping to get membership action plan for NATO. They were not given this membership action plan. They were just given the promise that these countries will become NATO members but nobody knows when.

And my reading is that it incited Russia to attack Georgia in August 2008 because it showed to Russia that, look, there is no plausible scenario, there is no plausible way towards NATO membership. Therefore, we'd rather attack it to leave this promise empty. While there are people like Jeffrey Sachs and some others who are saying, no, it's precisely because this promise was done that Russia attacked Georgia.

Georgia, which for me is totally ridiculous because it's not about NATO enlargement and Russia's reacting to NATO enlargement. It's about Russia's willing to enlarge and expand and countries who are willing to join NATO trying to find the protection in NATO against this expansion.

And I think we all agree that NATO's enlargement to Central Europe has helped Europe be more peaceful and more democratic. So let's imagine that the European Union today would have been like six or nine or 12 countries. Yeah. Imagine how unstable Europe would have been. Yeah. So already the fact that NATO and the EU are at almost 30 in the case of the EU and almost

means also that Europe is peaceful and that the enlargement of the European Union and NATO has been a major success in keeping most of the continent safe and peaceful. Now, listen, I think 2008, we can have, I think it's an almost endless conversation. Almost everyone made up their mind about what was a good idea or a bad idea. I think looking ahead,

I'm afraid that we're living in a situation where just an organizational or legal arrangement is not enough to keep peace. So you can have security guarantees for Ukraine, you can have, if all NATO member states accept Ukraine into NATO, Article 5 would apply to Ukraine, or if not,

But then we're also in a place where these legal and institutional realities will no longer be enough to keep peace, even if they happen. And what you, unfortunately, will probably need for the next few decades is to have also the physical means to keep peace. And that's protection. And that's a bit like the...

what you would call the South Korea or West German model. You know, yes, it's true, West Germany was in NATO, had American boots on the ground, also had their own military capacity with the French army and British army and American army being in West Germany to defend West Germany. In South Korea, you don't have a NATO, right? But you have a lot of military equipment defending peace. So if we look at ways to bring back

peace to Europe, then it's not enough to talk about security guarantees only. You also need very concrete ways of how do you ensure in a physical sense with the right, you know, military infrastructure, with the trenches and the minefields and the equipment to make sure that peace stays in place for a long time.

Unfortunately, signing new documents will not be enough. We've all had the Budapest memorandum. So this is where I feel a bit uncomfortable about people talking just about guarantees for Ukraine if there is a peace deal. Because those guarantees will need to be backed up with basically physical force. So the question, yes, the right guarantees is great, but it's not going to be enough. You will also need a Ukrainian capacity that...

that makes sure that there is not another war and that war does not enlarge the territory of destruction. That's a very good point, but you need to do a lot to achieve this. Let's imagine the bad scenario that America says, we don't care about Ukraine, it's Europe's thing, so Europeans go ahead. And Europeans are saying, okay,

We can replace America with money. We are ready to do that. We are not ready to send too many troops or probably we're even ready to send 10,000 people, which is already huge. I mean, 1,000, 2,000 from each country as instructors or in any other sense. But then there is a ceasefire, let's say, and then what we all need to do

we understand that we'll probably have several months, maybe several years, what we all need to do. Minefields, you know, more patriots, more aviation coming, more instructors, really some European Union military personnel, how realistic it is. I mean, people are talking about 50,000 and this figure is already shocking for European leaders, but 50,000...

in Ukraine, where on both sides of the front line there is one million army, it's really something very, very small. What is your policy advice, let's say? That is a very serious conversation among many European countries. This conversation about deploying some kind of military force onto Ukrainian territory.

There are multiple ways you could, in theory, structure this. Most likely, this is not a typical peacekeeping mission. A typical peacekeeping mission, not all, but most peacekeeping missions, they are mandated by some organization, let's say the United Nations. They are an interposition force. They don't always get to be very well respected by both sides. And we have instances, quite a lot of instances in the south of Lebanon where the Israeli army does not feel kind of

very constrained by the presence of the UN peacekeeping mission, very unifil. So that's not a situation not a lot of European militaries would like to find themselves disrespected while trying to separate the Ukrainian and the Russian army. I think the real conversation in Europe is more about deploying some kind of military force that helps Ukraine resist.

What kind of help it can give? Well, there's multiple ways. Maybe help with the air defense of some cities, being on the ground, not on the line, division contact line itself, but somewhere removed, but be there to send a signal of engagement. Usually this kind of signals of engagement do not necessarily need to be in millions. It's a political sign of presence.

And even if you go back to the Cold War, I don't know anymore. I knew the number at some point. How big was the Soviet army? Was it 2 million people, 1.5 million people? The Americans didn't keep a million soldiers on European soil. They kept just about enough to quickly react and also bring in reinforcements. So that's why I think even if the Europeans arrive to a situation where they deploy 50,000, 40,000, the main point of that is not

for these forces to be there in the kind of on their own to be facing a one million strong army. It's more of a way to be there, to dissuade and to facilitate if more need, more help is needed to specific operations. I think this is how it's more or less conceived.

Now those conversations are put on hold for a while, everyone waits to see a bit what are the concrete proposals from the Trump administration. Now these proposals we of course don't know, there's multiple speculations, there are all kinds of plans being leaked, ideas tested, how authentic are they, I don't know.

But I think it's pretty certain, well, it's pretty, let's say, likely from the way Trump talks about history, about the fake Obama red lines in Syria, about the Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, is that there is a sense that you might do something today and it will come to haunt you personally, your reputation, your legacy for the rest of your life and beyond.

And from the way Trump positioned himself, it does not look like he wants to go down in history as the person who was elected to do MAGA and ended up doing, you know, make Russia great again, MRUGA rather than MAGA.

I think this concern with what will his administration look like in four years from now or in 20 years from now should act as some kind of safeguard for people to think beyond just getting a ceasefire today and then not care that this ceasefire would be so bad that it provokes another war.

But look, again, what worries me that we again come back to America, right? Well, we're talking about, you know, European strategic autonomy. We come back to America and we say, OK, it's up to Trump. Anyway, for me, the trend is obvious. I mean, the trend is that

You can see America-European relations also through the decolonization lens. And there are not so many people who look at it like this. So because decolonization and the fall of the European empires, you can put America into this basket too, with the difference that at a certain time, while other colonies mostly still were kind of a...

you know countries about which Europe was caring about primarily in Africa maybe to the lesser extent in Latin America then the Northern America was caring about Europe starting from the First World War so it basically America decided the outcome of the First World War and of the Second World War

and sooner or later you will have a split. It's as if your children go away from you and in a certain moment they take care about you, but you know, they will still go away from you. And in the current world it's clear that America is looking into competition with China and Europe, you know, sooner or later will need to find, maybe now, maybe in 10 years, but if it doesn't become a security union,

If it doesn't become a hard power union, it will fail. And here, you know, European integration of Ukraine, this is a point many Ukrainians are saying to Europeans, and Europeans still don't want to hear it, is that, look, if you are serious about Ukraine joining the EU, then imagine a situation when Ukraine is in the EU and Russia attacks Ukraine again.

Even if Ukraine is not part of NATO, but it's part of the EU, what happens if Russia attacks Ukraine again? So European Union would need to protect it somehow. Do you feel that this conversation is starting in Europe finally or everything ends up with Trump and America? This conversation is happening. Now it has several subsections. So what you would hear in countries like Poland or the Baltic states is

is that, of course, what Trump has been saying about NATO, it's not good. But today, the EU and the countries of the European Union, be it on a public opinion level or in terms of military capabilities or planning capabilities, the EU without the Americans are not ready to defend militarily the European Union's border. They are not ready to do Article 42.7 of the EU.

And that is why you might like the US administration or not, as long as the EU is not more consolidated, maybe 10 years, maybe 15 years, the only responsible thing to do is to try and find an arrangement that keeps the United States involved. You mentioned strategic autonomy. I think to me kind of almost the paradox of it is that

But of course we know France is very strong in advocating for strategic autonomy since many, many years, since decades. Many countries like it, like this term, many countries are more skeptical. But besides France, probably the country where this term is the least popular is Poland. But I think Poland is probably the one country next to France that is taking strategic autonomy

very serious maybe much more even more serious than anyone else and you just look at polish defense spending going into five percent and the kind of polish defense acquisitions for a full spectrum capabilities army and whereas poland kind of in theory does not like the term does not use it and does not want to endorse it too much actually they're really really seriously doing strategic autonomy

because they know there might be a danger and yes, there are solidarity risks related to both the EU and NATO. So this, I don't know how things will go. The European publics are probably not yet ready to support the type of political forces that will turn Europe's capacity to defend itself into a reality very quickly. So NATO is still there. NATO is still indispensable.

But in the meantime, everyone inside NATO needs a stronger Europe. And that's clear. And there's a conversation to be had with European publics. My last question, what gives you hope? Listen, in history, a lot of hopeless situations ended up after difficult phases, ended up reasonably well. You know, I tend to like to read books written without hope.

knowing what happened. So hence the book from 1944. But one of the fascinating books I read also in recent years is a book published in, I think it was April 1940. No, no, it was not April 1940. It was a bit later. It's probably autumn 1940. It's called The Atene Palace. It's written by an American journalist who was in Bucharest at the time. And basically what she describes is

is quote-unquote a peaceful, pacified Europe. It's a Europe entirely controlled by Nazi Germany. It's a Europe where everyone takes orders from Berlin, from the Iberian Peninsula to Finland, and, you know, France is defeated.

And there is no active large-scale war. There's kind of bombing of the UK, and that's pretty much the only large-scale military action that happens, that people almost thought that World War II was over by that time. Yet it wasn't, because after that the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, the Japanese attacked the US, and that whole what looked like a...

A Europe settled and controlled under a web built around the Nazi dictatorships has collapsed in a few years. The hope is that things could still turn out reasonably well.

But they will probably get worse before they do so. That's probably not very optimistic. No, no. But that happened multiple times. There's this other time in history where... I think we need to be prepared for worse, but indeed hopeful for the best. Niko Popescu, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you, Volodymyr. This was a podcast explaining Ukraine by Ukraine World, a multilingual media about Ukraine.

My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I'm a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. My guest today was Niko Popescu, former vice prime minister of Moldova and currently a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

You can support our work at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. We really need your support now because our media is increasingly relying on crowdfunding. You can also support our volunteer trips to the frontline areas where we help both soldiers and civilians, bringing mostly cars for soldiers and books for civilians. You can support our trips at paypal.ukraine.resisting.gmail.com. You will find these links in the description of this episode. Stay with us and stand with Ukraine.