Europe Has a Seat at the Table Now. It Still Cannot Agree Who Sits In It

The ninth summit of the European Political Community met in Dublin on Thursday, with around 47 European leaders in the Convention Centre and the Irish state staging the largest diplomatic event it has ever hosted. On the margins, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met the two American officials who had come from Moscow that morning: Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

The headline concession came from Witkoff. Europeans will be present at the next round of negotiations, he told reporters, a demand the EU has made since the Abu Dhabi talks began without it. Zelenskyy confirmed the same in Dublin.

By the evening, the concession had turned into a problem.

The argument about the chair

Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, was asked by DW why Europe should get one seat when the United States takes two. She laughed. It was not a warm laugh.

The legal position she and António Costa have been making is that the treaties already answer the question. Foreign policy is the Council president's and the high representative's to represent. Estonia's prime minister, Kristen Michal, backed that reading publicly, telling POLITICO that Costa and Kallas should speak for the bloc. It is the cleanest answer available on paper and the weakest one politically, because it puts a former Estonian prime minister in the room with Vladimir Putin.

France and Germany want something else. Macron said in Dublin that Europe must first agree what its own proposals and security vision are before worrying about who presents them. Merz was blunter: the E3, meaning Germany, France and the United Kingdom, is "a well-established format", and he saw "no problem at all with things staying that way".

That formulation quietly excludes the EU institutions, Italy, Poland and the Baltic states from the core channel, and it does so in the week Meloni wrote to Costa complaining that the Union was projecting "the image of a Europe that is in disarray".

Several national leaders would simply like to attend themselves. Zelenskyy's request, made earlier in the week, is for Europe to settle on a single representative by the end of November.

What Europe actually fears

The anxiety in Dublin was not about procedure. It was about what Washington might concede about European security in exchange for a deal, and Putin gave the room its material in the remarks he made to Kushner and Witkoff in Moscow.

According to accounts of the meeting, Putin restated territorial demands, ruled out Ukrainian NATO membership, and raised the possibility of rolling the alliance back from Finland and Sweden. On European troops, he was explicit: any deployment after a peace agreement would be "a legitimate target", and the war would resume immediately.

That is a direct threat to the Coalition of the Willing, which Zelenskyy said will meet in Berlin next week and which has been rehearsing exactly that deployment. It is also the reason the Baltic and Nordic leaders treat the format question as existential rather than cosmetic. "Right now, we are in the trap," Michal said. "If something is a threat to you, will you discuss your defence with the threat itself?"

Merz's answer to the same question was to insist on the guest list rather than the chair: Ukraine, the Europeans, the Americans and Russia, all at the table.

The Irish framing

Taoiseach Micheál Martin, hosting, put the case in the terms his own country uses for everything. It would be "absurd if there was to be any peace deal without Europe at the table, because of course Europe is inextricably involved in this". He added that a ceasefire must come first, for Ukrainians, for Russians and for Europe.

Dublin also produced the summit's practical content. Zelenskyy held a multilateral meeting with around 20 partners on air defence, financial support and shelters, and bilateral talks with Meloni on air defence and with Tusk on the Coalition of the Willing's planned exercises.

Friday's real agenda

EU leaders meet again on Friday morning for an informal European Council that was convened to discuss artificial intelligence. It will now cover AI, Ukraine representation, Ukraine financing and, in the corridors, the succession at the European Central Bank.

The AI session itself has a live argument inside it: whether Europe should build frontier models to compete with American and Chinese developers, as Finland's Petteri Orpo and Estonia's Michal have urged, or concentrate on applications built on other people's models. Arthur Mensch of Mistral and Geoffrey Hinton will address the leaders. Money is the obstacle, as it is everywhere else on the agenda.

On financing, Merz's position has not moved. Germany, he argues, cannot accept free-riders on Ukraine and European security, and the next seven-year budget should not be settled until burden-sharing is. Slovakia's Robert Fico opposes further support outright. The Commission is due to bring options for the €70 billion gap, and Reuters reported from Dublin that both a new sanctions package and the Ukraine funding proposals will land before the end of the year.

What to watch

Whether Friday's conclusions name a representative or merely note that the question is open. Whether Kallas travels to the next round regardless. And whether the Berlin Coalition of the Willing meeting produces a deployment plan that Putin has already said he will treat as a resumption of war. Europe is closer to the table than it was on Wednesday. It has two weeks to decide who is standing behind the chair.