Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Donald Trump told reporters that the US and Saudi Arabia had reached a "defence agreement". (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
The Financial Times reported that "the Trump administration had told Zelenskyy and other people in his team that the White House was working to an 'aggressive' timeline to finalise the proposal in order to bring the war to an end before the close of the year".
The outlet reported that US officials expected Zelenskyy to sign the agreement "before Thanksgiving" on Thursday next week, to present a peace deal in Moscow later this month and wrap up the process by early December.
The EU immediately rejected the plan, such as it apparently is, with its top diplomat Kaja Kallas saying that for any plan to succeed, "it has to be supported by Ukraine and it has to be supported by Europe".
"The pressure must be on the aggressor, not on the victim. Rewarding aggression will only invite more of it," she said.
You might think: "Well they would say that, wouldn't they?"
But there is more than just moral outrage involved here.
Under the terms of the agreement, Ukraine would be forced to give concessions that Vladimir Putin has long wanted. (Reuters: Kremlin.ru)
How much agency does Europe really have?
The Europeans had thought that the deal to buy US weapons on behalf of Ukraine gave them a seat at the table on the future of that war-ravaged country.
"How do Europeans have so little agency here even when we're now paying the entire bill?" the website Politico.eu quoted a senior European official saying.
And this of course is the question. The sense of menace from Russia in Western Europe has been growing in recent weeks, along with its increasing attacks on western Ukraine, thanks to the presence of drones in the air and Russian vessels around the coast.
Yet it does not seem able to harness enough clear direction to claim that agency even when so hard pressed.
US sanctions on Russia's biggest oil firms — which are generally predicted to inflict a lot more pain than many of the sanctions to date — are due to start soon.
But Ukraine is rapidly running out of money. And Zelenskyy is now facing an internal crisis over a massive corruption scheme.
That is only likely to have increased the difficulties for European allies who have been delaying a decision to release billions of dollars in loans to Ukraine on the back of Russian state assets frozen in European banks, particularly in Belgium.
Leaders are not due to discuss the issue again until just before Christmas, with Belgium making it clear it feels vulnerable to both legal action and the loss of other sovereign banking business if it does release the funds.
The question of how much agency Europe really has if it sets its mind to this does provoke the reverse question of exactly what agency Trump has here. Is he going to order that weapons sales to Europe — to be sold on to Ukraine — be stopped and deprive American military arms makers of sales?
The US's massive military industrial manufacturing capacity has given it, and gives it, as much of its strategic heft as its economic affluence.
The question is whether a medium- to long-term effect of his powerplays will actually be to erode that manufacturing heft.
Germany's Friedrich Merz has expressed the view that Europe should now be giving preference to purchases of European military hardware. (AP: Markus Schreiber)
Europe's military spending
In recent weeks, both France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Friedrich Merz have expressed the view that Europe should now be giving preference to purchases of European military hardware, as part of a needed build of self-reliance.
The EU's trade and economic security commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, who has been in Australia this week on trade talks, expressed a similar view in an interview with the ABC.
The decision taken at NATO to increase military spending to 5 per cent of GDP "means that we want not only to spend more but in a smart way", he said.
"If you look at our combined military budgets, it's a huge volume of money", but the fragmentation of national defence industries and budgets meant, "we are not always getting the best value for this procurement".
He was talking, amongst other things, about the so-called SAFE program (Security Action for Europe) which facilitates joint procurement of military hardware, a scheme designed in part to get around the tradition of Europe at one point famously having 17 different tank designs.
Sefcovic sees the plan as one "to get the armaments we need and of course to also put the military industry on the new stronger basis so we can rely on the power of the European industry to produce the arms we need in this volatile period".
Every day there are stories in the European and international media about the reconfiguring of European industry towards military production.
Just how fast this transition occurs will have much bearing on its agency in the future, and on that of the US.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.
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