Two people were arrested in Dublin's city centre on Thursday during a protest organised by "Mothers Against Genocide" while more than a dozen heads of government sat inside the European Political Community summit trading promises about Ukraine. That's the arithmetic of the day: the leaders got the room, the mothers got the handcuffs.
Inside, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky he had "complete support." He and Zelensky sat side by side at the head of the table. The guest list read like a directory of the continental apparatus: France's Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Friedrich Merz, Ireland's Micheál Martin, Canada's Mark Carney, the presidents of the EU Commission and Council, and the chief of Nato. Leaders from more than 40 European countries gathered in the biannual EPC, a body established in 2022 after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This week marks its fourth anniversary, and its main product so far is more summitry.
A Seat at Someone Else's Table
The headline demand from Dublin wasn't an end to the war. It was a chair. "We will obviously continue to press for European representation in that process," Burnham said, of the US-brokered talks. Asked whether Ukraine was weaker for the lack of European voices, he replied: "There are European voices in the room. Our national security adviser for one." Then came the bit about leaders determined to "put a bit of a ring of steel around Zelensky."
The room in question, it turns out, has a doorman. Al Jazeera reported that US envoy Steve Witkoff said Putin agreed to let European representatives join the next round of discussions. Europe's access, in other words, depends on the permission of the man it is sanctioning. And the one concrete scheduling detail didn't hold up either: Burnham said UK national security adviser Jonathan Powell planned to join Zelensky's meeting in Dublin with Witkoff and Jared Kushner, but No 10 later said the meeting was delayed and Powell could no longer attend.
Sanctions as Theatre
Burnham announced a fresh package of sanctions covering all 10 of Russia's major oil producers. "We are continuing to take practical action to prevent Putin's war machine being funded," he said. Downing Street said the package included shadow fleet vessels, Slavneft, and Rosneft's flagship Arctic oil and gas project LLC Vostok Oil. The word "war machine" got an outing for Moscow's side only; the machine on the Dublin side of the table, Nato's chief included, went unremarked.
He also cautioned against reading "too much into" the talks in Abu Dhabi, saying the focus must be a ceasefire "rather than the issues Russia wants to put on the table around security arrangements in Europe."
Hybrid Attacks, Familiar Remedies
The summit was dominated by hybrid attacks: hoaxes and cyberattacks that have recently hit supermarkets, blood banks, passenger airlines, schools and media outlets. More than 3,700 Italian schools received hoax bomb warnings on Thursday, a day after 6,300 schools were hit by a similar alert. Martin said those responsible seek to "create confusion, sow division and weaken public confidence in our democratic systems." The people who bear the disruption are pupils, patients and passengers; the people who get the summit are the leaders.
The Electoral Circus Turns
The EPC convened a week after US midterm elections that saw extensive losses for Trump's Republican Party. Populist leaders have recently been ousted in Serbia and Hungary, while the far right is still on the rise in Europe and has made recent gains in regional elections in Germany. Ballots swing, and the same faces keep coming back to the same tables.
Burnham, who flew in from the UN Cop31 climate conference in Turkey, also used Dublin to advance his "ambition for a new relationship with the European Union," meeting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni face-to-face for the first time. The next stop is a UK-EU summit in Brussels on Friday 20 November, one week from today.
Nothing in the base record says what the Dublin protesters were charged with, or whether anyone inside heard them.
- ukraine
- volodymyr zelensky
- andy burnham
- european political community
- peace talks
- russia sanctions
- dublin
- hybrid attacks