Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on the way to London this morning before a European defense summit tomorrow seeking to define the conditions towards lasting peace in Ukraine.
The summit was announced earlier in the week to involve European leaders, but takes a new goal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, shortly after an explosive meeting on Friday with US President Donald Trump in the White House.
kyiv and Washington had to sign an agreement of critical minors in the context of efforts to end the Ukraine War with Russia, but Trump showed an open disdain for Zelenskyy after insisting that he insisted that the agreement includes security guarantees from the United States
Europe was shaken earlier this month by Trump’s openings towards Russia and began to make its own plans to strengthen the defense of Ukraine, seeing it as part of the main safety interests of Europe.
Canada was not mentioned as one of the countries invited to join the Sunday meeting when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer discussed the event during his trip to Washington to meet Trump earlier this week.
Steve Hewitt, an intelligence researcher who teaches Canadian studies at the University of Birmingham in England, says that Trudeau goes to the top sends a message to which Ottawa sees his partners.
“It is a kind of political declaration in many ways,” said Hewitt.
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“There is a huge amount of symbolism around this meeting.”
He said that symbolism can also be seen in Trudeau and various European leaders supporting Zelenskyy on social networks, calling it “a clear positioning” that disagrees with Trump, adding that it is “remarkable” that the United States repels Europe’s security problems.
“I do not think there is a parallel, certainly in the past 100 years, for what is happening right now – certainly not since the Second World War with the Cold War,” said Hewitt, who is a historian.
It has drawn a parallel between Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and Canada can no longer count on the United States for Defense and Economic Safety. “The two countries, in a sense, have been cut, to a certain extent,” he said.
Starmer said he was positioning the United Kingdom as a bridge between the United States and the European Union, and Hewitt said that Starmer “would try to keep the two happy sides, and that could well alienate both sides in the process.”
With this in mind, Canada is looking for stronger links with partners other than the United States
Starmer should meet Zelenskyy before Sunday talks and also invited leaders of NATO, the European Commission, as well as more than a dozen countries, including France, Germany, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands.
During his own visit to Washington, Starmer assaulted among some Canadians by choosing to push Trump’s speech to the annex of Canada, when asked for his thoughts on the idea.
Hewitt said this decision was “very insulting” for many Canadians, but had little media coverage in Great Britain, despite the Canadians who are looking for the United Kingdom as a close partner and some suggesting that King Charles should weigh on Trump’s threats.
“There is a little nostalgia (in) this idea that the United Kingdom is still actively causing Canada or that King Charles could-regardless of the British government-make a kind of political declaration,” he said.
“These things will not happen, and I think that the Starmer government has calculated that they must remain in a way on the side of the United States.”
Hewitt has lived in Great Britain for 23 years and says that he is frustrated by “forgetting here to what is going on in Canada, and the whole accent is put on the United States-despite the historical ties between Canada and the United Kingdom”
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press
