Europe’s <I>clavo ardiendo</I> non-strategy

In the early summer of 2026, that clavo ardiendo appears as follows: Russia is not winning the war in any meaningful strategic sense. Its military performance appears to be losing momentum, perhaps even approaching culmination, and it remains far from achieving its declared objectives in Ukraine. Meanwhile, economic strains are mounting at home, signs of social discontent are becoming harder to ignore, and cracks within the Kremlin’s elites are increasingly visible. Remarkably timely, a Russian media outlet has leaked what some believe to be an internal plan prepared by the team of Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy head of the presidential administration, outlining how Moscow might present a defeat in Ukraine as a victory to the Russian public. In what some read as an early step in that direction, Vladimir Putin recently said that, given “Russia’s advances on the battlefield,” the war is “coming to an end”.

Those remarks came soon after Putin’s meeting with Xi Jinping and alongside reports, later denied by Chinese officials, that Xi had told US President Donald Trump that Putin “might end up regretting having started this war”. On top of this, Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently suggested that “there is a window for negotiations,” and the picture becomes even more tempting for those inclined to believe diplomacy is just around the corner.

For many in Europe, these signs – combined with Russia’s domestic troubles and the limits of its battlefield performance – can “rationally” lead to a new round of negotiations that will put an end to more than four years of war and will lay the foundations for a new European security architecture. Beneath that hope lies the implicit assumption that Russia will eventually have to compromise. Perhaps it will, but for now, that expectation looks very much like another clavo ardiendo – and clinging to it could leave Europe in an even weaker strategic position than it occupies today.

So far, Russia has shown no serious willingness to negotiate and no meaningful retreat from its maximalist position. Its demands still amount, in practice, to the political submission of Kyiv and its European backers. This may sound obvious to readers from Central Europe and the Nordic-Baltic region, but it is less widely understood in parts of Western and Southern Europe. It is therefore worth recalling a basic point: since the start of its military aggression in 2014, Moscow’s ultimate objective has never been limited to Donbas. What Russia has sought is Ukraine’s acceptance of its strategic and cultural tutelage. In other words, Moscow disputes Ukraine’s right to exist as a fully sovereign state and as a national identity split from an imperial Russian identity. Putin lays out this logic plainly in his July 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”.

Nor does the problem stop at Ukraine. As the two draft treaties, the Kremlin issued as ultimatums to the United States and NATO in December 2021 made unmistakably clear, Russia’s appetite and strategic ambitions go further beyond Ukraine. Moscow is contesting both the idea that NATO and the EU organize the continent’s strategic space, and the right of European states to choose their alliances and foreign-policy orientation. Put bluntly, Russia is asking for a modern version of the Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty – for Ukraine and for a large part of Europe.

It is possible, of course, to argue that this maximalism does not rule out negotiations. Perhaps it simply reflects Moscow’s desire to begin talks from a position of apparent strength. But even then, it is hard to see why the Kremlin would conclude that the benefits of compromise outweigh the costs of abandoning its wider agenda; or the domestic risks of ending the war without something it can plausibly call victory. Putin has bound both his legacy and his political future to achieving a strategic success against Ukraine and the “collective West”. The more likely outcome, therefore, is not a real opening to peace but another round of meetings, and diplomatic theatre in which Russia would try to gain political and strategic ground against Europe (and, indirectly, against Ukraine).

One way Moscow will try to do that is by widening the gap between the US and Europe. This remains the central weakness of a Europe that still cannot deter Russia without the US. As long as that is true, the Russian threat will endure and could intensify. It is worth remembering that the full-scale invasion of February 2022 was, at its core, the product of a deterrence crisis in Europe. Russia wrongly believed that Ukraine would collapse quickly, which helps explain both the extraordinary overconfidence of its war plan and the scale of its subsequent military and political misjudgements. But Moscow had also been told, explicitly, by the US and Europe’s major powers, that there would be no direct military response: no allied boots on the ground under any circumstances. In effect, nothing deterred a Russia that believed it could take Kyiv in three days.

More than four years later, Russia has not broken Ukraine’s will and capacity to fight, and Kyiv has emerged as a more capable military actor with greater strategic autonomy than many expected. Yet Europe’s deterrence crisis has not been solved. It has become more acute. Mainly due to the growing uncertainty about US commitment to Europe’s defence and Europe’s continuing failure to build a credible defence posture of its own. That leaves the continent drifting towards the worst of both worlds: still dependent on Washington, but no longer confident in Washington. Under those conditions, the Kremlin has little reason to enter serious negotiations, except perhaps to pursue a temporary ceasefire that would interrupt Ukraine’s remarkably effective deep-strike campaign inside Russia. As long as Europe cannot deter Russia conventionally, talk of gradual reengagement or selective détente with Moscow is not merely premature. It is dangerous, because it raises the risk of Russian coercion – or worse, an attack against an EU or NATO member. Europe’s priority should be clear: it must strengthen deterrence across every domain, urgently and consistently.

That means military capability – conventional and nuclear – along with political will, strategic communication, and credible signalling. On every one of those fronts, Europe remains weaker than it should be. The nuclear question is especially consequential, since it sits at the core of deterrence and strategic stability. Yet Europeans have no satisfactory short- or medium-term answer that does not depend on the US. Washington still extends its nuclear umbrella over Europe, at least in formal terms, which is also why it opposes the so-called “friendly proliferation” – the acquisition of nuclear weapons by allies ranging from Poland or Sweden to South Korea or Japan.

Yet that umbrella cannot indefinitely be separated from the broader strains in the transatlantic relationship or from the uncertainty created by an American strategy that appears to simultaneously pair nuclear guarantees with a sharp reduction in conventional military presence in Europe. If US forces are no longer meaningfully present on the continent, then faith in the enduring credibility of the American nuclear guarantee may become just one more clavo ardiendo for Europeans to cling to.

Even if some countries – notably Poland, Finland and a few others – are taking their defence responsibilities seriously, Europe as a whole remains far from ready to assume primary responsibility for the continent’s conventional defence. Nor has it given a robust and effective response to Russian hybrid aggression. At the political level, cohesion remains weak and resolve uncertain. Whatever happens next in Ukraine, Europe will have to confront a menacing Russia from a position of dangerous strategic fragility.

 

Nicolás de Pedro is senior counsellor at Earendel Associates a London-based firm that provides strategic advice to corporate leaders and decision-makers. The views expressed are solely those of the author.