The latest EU emergency meeting in Paris broke up again with little decided, significant backtracking on earlier commitments to sending peacekeepers to Ukraine and Europe’s increasing irrelevance to Ukraine’s fate in its conflict with Russia.

Some 30 countries, the so-called coalition of the willing, attended the meeting in Paris called by French President Emmanuel Macron on March 27. The EU is scrambling to meet the challenge of the US withdrawal of support and US President Donald Trump’s soft stance to negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but are being routinely ignored by the White House and sidelined from the talks being held in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

Participants of the Paris summit did not reach a unanimous agreement on deploying military forces to Ukraine as part of a so-called peacekeeping mission, and the format of such a mission remains undecided, said Macron.

Macron downgraded the commitment switching from calling them
“peacekeepers” to “dissuasion forces.” There was already a debate running amongst the “coalition of the willing” as to if the forces should be placed on the front line, the UK’s position, or well in the rear to prevent direct clashes between Nato-backed forces and the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR), France’s position.

"These support forces were offered by France and the UK. They will be represented by several countries because it was not possible to achieve unity on this issue. Some do not have the opportunity, others are hindered by the political context," Macron said, adding, however, that London and Paris "do not need unity" to implement their plans.

The proposal to send peacekeepers to Ukraine has also been championed by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in lieu of offering Ukraine genuine Nato Article 5-like promises of boots on the ground support should Russia invade for a second time, should a ceasefire deal be reached.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier said that the Kremlin was adamantly opposed to any Nato-backed peacekeepers on the ground in Ukraine.

The French president acknowledged that the format of the "support forces" would also require additional discussions. As bne IntelliNews reported, European leaders are cooling on the idea of deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine as unworkable.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk noted that "it is already clear that the United Kingdom, France and some other countries" are ready to send a mission in Ukraine to "monitor the observance of peace" but reiterated that Poland would not send troops to Ukraine. Earlier Tusk made clear that he sees Poland’s role as securing Europe’s eastern border against Russia, a stance echoed by Finland that probably has Europe’s most battle ready armed forces.

"Today, there was no goal to make any decisions on sending a stabilization mission to Ukraine," Tusk said at a press conference broadcast by TVP Info. "Now is not the time to specify these plans, while there are no preliminary results of the US-Russian negotiations."

The comments at the Paris meeting are a significant climb down from a similar meeting in London on March 20, hosted by Starmer, who said the deployment of the peacekeepers was about to go into an “operational” phase.

However, the lack of commitment has come under increasing criticism. The plans were dismissed as “political theatre,” by a senior British army source speaking to the Daily Telegraph earlier this week. He said Starmer’s plan has no "defined military end-state or military-strategic planning assumptions."

Indeed, the whole coalition of the willing project remains vague. No definitive list of the members has been released, although 18 of the EU 27 members have indicated they will participate in some way. Only the UK and France have made firm commitments to sending soldiers.

Speaking at a press conference after the meeting Starmer also downgraded the UK’s commitment, focusing on providing air and maritime support, which is easier to deliver and can be based outside of Ukraine, saying little about sending 10,000 British troops on Ukrainian soil as per his previous comments.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was sticking to the original script and said that a plan to deploy European troops to Ukraine could be ready in the next 7-10 days.

"Ukraine will come up with an algorithm for dialogue. This will happen within the next seven or ten days, the meeting that [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron was talking about," he said. "We will unveil the basic strategy."

However, the increasingly embattled Zelenskiy also hinted at the dissension amongst his allies and made it clear there was still no consensus amongst Ukraine allies on what to do next. Zelenskiy said he had received "many proposals from [European] leaders, and their number is growing."

"Some are ready to assist in the skies, some offer air defence, some suggest boots on the ground, some are ready to deploy their contingent at sea," he added.

He also admitted that Ukraine’s Nato membership is now definitely off the table. Zelenskiy made rapid accession to the military alliance the cornerstone of his plans to ensure Ukraine’s security in a post-war environment for all of the last three years of war.

"We have to admit it. Discussions on Nato are not particularly active," he said, adding as a second best, EU leaders have promised him they will help keep Ukraine’s armed forces strong so the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) can provide for its own security. As bne IntelliNews reported, Ukraine’s neutrality and its Finlandisation is becoming increasingly likely as the only viable end game for the conflict with Russia.

No sanctions relief

The coalition leaders were clearer on their commitment to not only keeping sanctions on Russia in place, but also possibly increasing them.

In the new Black Sea grain deal cut in Riyadh on March 25, the Trump administration appears to have agreed to lift a number of sanctions including the financial sanctions on Russia’s state-owned agricultural bank, Rosselkhozbank. If confirmed, the removal of these sanctions would be a major diplomatic win for Putin.

Lifting sanctions on Russia now would be a diplomatic disaster,  Zelenskiy said during a meeting with EU leaders.

"Sanctions are one of the few real tools the world has to force Russia into serious negotiations. What else is there besides sanctions? If sanctions are weakened and Russia violates the agreement, the process of returning sanctions will be incredibly slow and difficult. And by that time, many will simply stop believing that sanctions actually work," Zelenskiy said while speaking

However, the decision is further complicated over if the US decision to ease the sanctions is workable. The SWIFT messaging service that runs bank transfers is based in Europe and subject to EU laws, which has not agreed to ease sanctions on Rosselkhozbank. But the US mechanism for enforcing the ban is to threaten secondary sanctions on any bank working with Russia against their US branches. It is not yet clear if banks can now work with the Russian agrobank outside the EU or not.

“The time to lift sanctions against Russia has not yet come,” Starmer said in a press conference following the meeting. "Quite the contrary, what we discussed is how we can increase sanctions to support the US initiative, to bring Russia to the table through further pressure from this group of countries," Starmer added.

His comments were backed up by Eu officials attending the meeting, Euroactiv reported. "Everyone is still analysing what this means or could mean. But so far, it’s a statement [about the agreements between Russia and the US] we have had no involvement in. Before the sanctions renewal [in July this year], nothing changed, and we’ll work on nothing to be changed because Russia itself hasn’t changed nor have its goals," one of the EU diplomats told Euractiv.

The EU has said earlier that the only time it will consider easing sanctions on Russia is after all fighting has ended and the AFR has completely withdrawn from Ukrainian territory.

"SWIFT cannot connect Russian banks to the network unless the EU changes its sanctions' legislation," said Janis Kluge, senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, as cited by TASS. "[US President Donald] Trump could also potentially try and pressure SWIFT, which would make their lives very difficult, but it cannot go against EU rules," Kluge told Euroactiv.

Despite the tough talk, the European delegates are hunting for ways to inflict more sanctions pain on Russia, but as the European sanctions regime has largely failed their options are limited.

"The cooperation between the countries whose leaders met in Paris today will be aimed at searching for solutions that may sometimes be unconventional. For example, in order to extend anti-Russian sanctions,"Tusk told reporters at a news conference, who currently holds the chairmanship of the European Council. "I’ve raised the question of looking for ways to make a common EU approach to Russia possible, even if Hungary is not interested," he added.