The standing ovation ran for nearly a minute and left Volodymyr Zelensky visibly emotional. It came on Saturday, February 15, 2025, day two of the Munich Security Conference, when the Ukrainian president walked on stage with the invasion’s third anniversary only days away. Foreign Policy described him as the man who had been the toast of the city for three years running.
His central message was about Europe, not Crimea. Zelensky called for an “army of Europe.” “Many leaders have talked about a Europe that needs its own military,” he said, and he believed “the time has come. The Armed Forces of Europe must be created.” Reuters reported that he tied the idea to what US Vice President JD Vance had said in Munich the day before, which in his reading showed a changing bond between Washington and its European partners. The i Paper noted that he also suggested Europe would have to supply the bulk of any force securing peace in Ukraine.
A warning to Washington
The speech landed in the middle of a jolt to the transatlantic order. President Donald Trump had phoned Vladimir Putin earlier in the week and said the two had agreed to start negotiations right away, without first consulting Kyiv. The Kyiv Independent said Trump had signaled that Kyiv was not an equal partner in those talks, and that Europe might not be invited at all.
Zelensky’s reply was blunt. “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement,” he said. “No decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine. No decisions about Europe without Europe.” He told the hall that if Ukraine was left out of decisions on its own future, “then we will lose.” He also called it “dangerous” for Trump to meet Putin before the two of them had met.
He asked whether America needed Europe as a market, and answered yes. As an ally? “I don’t know,” he said, adding that for that answer to turn into a yes, Europe had to speak with one voice rather than a dozen.
Red Square and NATO
Zelensky predicted Putin would try to get the US president onto Red Square on May 9 “not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance.” Putin’s game, he said, was to carve up the world by negotiating with America alone.
He would not take NATO membership off the table either, though he argued that the alliance’s most influential member at the moment seemed to be Putin, whose whims could block NATO decisions. It was Ukraine’s own army, he said, that had stopped Russia, not NATO troops.
He warned Europeans that they might be next. If the war ended badly, Reuters quoted him as saying, Putin would have a surplus of battle-hardened soldiers, and he cited intelligence that Russia would send troops to Belarus that summer. He also raised the Russian strike on the closed Chernobyl plant the evening before the conference opened, saying that a state which carries out such attacks “does not want peace.”
Not everyone was won over. A senior official from an eastern EU member state told Reuters, “There is a European military force called NATO.” European governments have so far turned down calls for a single army, with national sovereignty over defense as their argument. Zelensky said he wanted to gather European leaders and key partners in Kyiv and online on February 24, the third anniversary of the invasion.
Sources
- 'Putin is weak. We must use that' – Zelensky's Munich speech in 5 key quotes (Kyiv Independent)
- Zelensky calls for European army to deter Russia, earn US respect (Reuters via Arab News)
- The five major talking points from Zelensky's speech in Munich (i News)
- Zelensky Makes European Army Pitch at Munich Security Conference (Foreign Policy)
