EU leaders name five states to represent Europe in Ukraine talks

European Union leaders agreed in Dublin on Friday that Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the EU's own institutions will represent Europe in any talks with Russia on ending the war in Ukraine. The decision came after US envoys said on Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had given a green light for them to join negotiations.

Latvia's prime minister, Andris Kulbergs, used the Dublin meeting to reject Moscow's demand that Europe's broader security framework be written into the Ukraine talks. Latvia is a Baltic state bordering Russia and a member of both the EU and NATO. "Europe is the military power," Kulbergs told AFP afterwards. "So I think they are not in a position to really put on a table demands." He added: "We should understand who is who, in size and capabilities."

President Donald Trump's team has proposed putting wider European security arrangements on the agenda of any effort to stop the fighting. Russia, according to the same reporting, appears to want to revive its demand that NATO scale back, a position European leaders in Dublin pushed against.

Kulbergs called the choice of five countries plus EU institutions to speak for Europe "a good decision". A senior EU official said that with the question of representation settled, Europe could turn to the substance of negotiations with Russia.

The Latvian leader said two days of US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi, which ended with Russia and Ukraine agreeing their largest prisoner release of the war, were "a good sign" but "not enough". "If Putin wants real peace, then cease fire," he said, and urged Washington to press Moscow harder, including through sanctions and by supplying Ukraine with what he called "real weapons". He said he did not believe Putin wanted real peace.

France 24's Spotlight programme, in a separate discussion of the same diplomacy, hosted Alexander Titov, a lecturer in modern European history at Queen's University Belfast. Titov said Russia wants negotiations to go beyond a ceasefire to cover territory, NATO and Ukraine's post-war relations with other countries. European governments "don't really have a single voice", he said, and "Russia is not in any rush", with conditions on the battlefield and in the economy likely to prove more decisive than any meeting.