French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will co-chair a hybrid meeting in Kyiv on Monday, where the so-called Coalition of the Willing will discuss continued support for Ukraine amid another year of Russian aggression. The choreography is familiar: leaders in suits, some of them dialing in remotely, arranging the next layer of state-managed violence while ordinary people live with the consequences.
War by Committee
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will also participate in the meeting, which the Élysée Palace said will reaffirm support for Kyiv and advance work on security guarantees aimed at fostering a long and lasting peace if a ceasefire is brokered. That language does what official language always does. It wraps military coordination in the vocabulary of peace, then asks everyone to pretend the machinery underneath isn’t there.
The same statement said the leaders will continue to condemn Russia for its full-scale invasion and discuss coordinated measures to curtail resources supporting its war efforts, including "shadow fleet" vessels, which are oil tankers circumventing EU sanctions. The sanctions regime, like the rest of the border-and-power architecture in Europe, is presented as moral discipline. In practice, it is a tool of state pressure, enforced by governments and institutions that claim the right to decide which flows are legitimate and which ones get blocked.
European Council President António Costa will attend in person, official documents confirm, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is not scheduled to attend in person. The absence matters less than the structure around it. Brussels remains in the room either way, whether through the Council, the Commission, or the national leaders who keep the whole arrangement moving. Different offices, same hierarchy.
The Brussels Apparatus
The Coalition of the Willing is a group of 34 countries that have pledged and delivered support to Ukraine amid Russia’s full-scale invasion. That support includes the anti-ballistic coalition, an agreement to deploy troops or equipment for post-war Ukraine and the UK participating in the EU's €90 billion loan for Ukraine. The numbers are large because the system is large. The money moves. The equipment moves. The people who pay for it don’t get a vote on the terms.
The EU loan is another reminder that the single market and its financial architecture are never far from the war room. The same bloc that lectures about rules and stability can marshal €90 billion for a loan, coordinate sanctions, and frame military planning as responsible governance. It’s the same old continental order, just with better branding and a cleaner press release.
Monday’s meeting lands on a date heavy with symbolism for the Ukrainian state. The date is significant because Monday marks 35 years since Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. That anniversary will be folded into the summit’s messaging, no doubt, with the usual speeches about sovereignty and resilience. But the event itself shows sovereignty in its modern form: negotiated among presidents, prime ministers, councils and commissions, with war support, sanctions and security guarantees all handled from above.
Who Decides, Who Pays
The Coalition of the Willing’s 34 countries have already pledged and delivered support, and now they’re meeting again to decide what comes next. The public gets the language of peace, the language of guarantees, the language of coordination. What it sees less clearly is the permanent expansion of state power that sits behind those words — the meetings, the loans, the sanctions, the troop and equipment arrangements, the remote participation, the in-person attendance, the whole ritual of managed consent.
The summit in Kyiv will not change that structure. It will refine it. It will give it another communiqué, another round of official gravity, another claim that the people at the top are steering history rather than administering it.