At a very basic level, she isn’t a diplomat, she lacks a democratic mandate and she has no plan.
Ian Proud was a member of HM Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. From July 2014 to February 2019 Ian was posted to the British Embassy in Moscow. He was also Director of the Diplomatic Academy for Eastern Europe and Central Asia and Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Anglo-American School of Moscow
Cross-posted from Ian’s Substack The Peacemonger
Now that Zelensky has been battered by Trump and with Starmer trying to rebuild bridges to America, he may have fall to back for support on Europe’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas. God help us all.
The earth is still shaking from President Trump and Vice President Vance’s tag team annihilation of Volodymir Zelensky at the White House. The 27 February meeting between Trump and Keir Starmer was a more convivial affair, with the British Prime Minister quiet on Ukraine while promoting the idea of much prized trade talks with America.
That was the first signal of the UK getting real about its foreign policy disaster in Ukraine and recognising that it needs trade with America far more than it needs the unsustainable cost of propping up an unwinnable war. This UK position was solidified at the Lancaster House Summit on 2 March with the revelation that the UK and France are working on a peace plan for Ukraine and reporting directly to President Trump. For Starmer, at least, the US President is now the conductor of western foreign policy.
This leaves the Zelensky’s fate in the hands of the European Union. And with Kaja Kallas the current EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the omens aren’t promising.
Kallas’ problem is threefold.
First, she is not diplomatic.
If the biggest foreign policy challenge in Kallas’ in-tray right now is the war in Ukraine, then her ingrained hatred of Russia makes her a singularly bad choice as Europe’s lead diplomat.
Her worldview is carved out of her experience growing up in the Soviet Union the child of a woman who was deported to Siberia in 1949. She looks at Russia through a shattered lens of Estonia’s suffering during the so-called communist terror after the end of World War II. In fact, she is an entitled child of a well-heeled Soviet family, who has retrofitted her hatred of Russia to shape the zeitgeist of a modern, post-Soviet Estonia.
How she sees events in Ukraine today is simply a continuum of the confected folklore of her life. Russia is the hated enemy, and, at some point, Russia will return to conquer Estonia once more. In her statements before war in Ukraine started, Kallas reaffirmed her view that Estonia could be the next country that Russia invades. As a NATO country, I have never seen any evidence that Russia has a plan to do this.
Kallas has called for NATO troops to be deployed to Ukraine, to ensure Russia’s total defeat. She has suggested that Russia be broken up into a series of smaller states. She once implied that Ukraine should inflict more civilian casualties on Russian citizens, to balance the number of casualties in Ukraine. Even as President Trump has said that NATO membership for Ukraine is unrealistic, she has continued to push for this to be kept on the table, despite it having been a redline for Russia for nineteen years. Indeed, she has spoken about the need for the collective west to take on China next. And, after Trump verbally beat up Zelensky in the Oval Office, she has called for a new leader of the free world, that is, to isolate the US President.
Almost every idiotic thing that Kaja Kallas says is rooted in vast personal ambition and an unshakeable belief that defeating Russia is vital for the world to become a safer place.
The world is full of extremists, of course. However, she claims to be the leading diplomat of Europe. She seems singularly ill-suited to that role. But will nonetheless still support Zelensky, I’m sure.
Which ushers in her second problem, the absence of a democratic mandate.
No one voted for Kallas to occupy her office in Brussels. While Zelensky has only been unelected since May of 2024, Kallas will only ever be an unelected apparatchik.
Countries that are sceptical about the European project often express concerns about the lack of democratic accountability of EU institutions.
When The European Union’s role was focussed on creating a united economic, social and cultural space among nations after the ravages of World War II, it found peace by opening up borders. However, as it has grown, Europe has become increasingly bureaucratic. Following agreement of the Lisbon Treaty, the creation of a High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security with a newly formed European External Action Service, continued this centralising trend.
Without any democratic mandate, occupants of the High Representative role have struggled for relevance. Outside of trade policy, individual Member States still manage their own bilateral diplomacy. And as the war in Ukraine has backfired on Europe through economic decline and political dissent, so European countries have sought their divergent paths. Hence the growth of a real split through Central Europe with countries like Austria, Slovakia and Hungary (free political expression seems to have been temporarily banned in Romania) calling out EU foreign policy as self-defeating, and refusing to toe the line.
That has left ineffectual figures like Josep Borrel before, and ideologues like Kallas now, unable to play the sort of coordinating role that they crave.
So, in practice, Kallas’ influence on the actions of Member States is limited, although she has considerable power to cause harm through inflammatory public statements. This is a huge challenge when dealing with countries like Russia, where the leaders there understand fully the limitations on Kallas’ role and ignore her. Instead, Russia focusses its influencing efforts on key EU members states, especially in Central Europe – see my comments above.
Even though Kallas can call for the continued isolation of Russia as support for Zelensky rapidly crumbles, she has no real power to enforce that. She lacks a mandate.
So herein lies her third problem.
Kaja Kallas has no strategy.
There is a huge risk that Kallas is seen as a single-issue High Representative, as her main effort appears to be on the war in Ukraine.
She appears intent only on sustaining the decade-long European policy on non-engagement with Russia, whatever the economic cost. But in that regard, not only is she bringing no new ideas on foreign policy, her lack of flexibility will make her look out of touch at a time when Europe is facing significant economic and political challenges caused by the war. Arriving into the job in December, Kallas has brought plenty of heat, but no light.
Donald Trump has now arrived heralding a seismic shift in US policy and she still thinks the earth is flat. She has criticised President Trump’s radical shift towards direct engagement with Russia without offering a compelling alternative vision.
The ‘Russia is coming for Europe next’ continues to be the rhetorical life-raft that she clings to as she tries desperately to help the now stranded Zelensky fight to the last Ukrainian.
Kallas is certainly not the author of the EU policy that has tried explicitly to isolate Russia on the world stage. But she has worked tirelessly to keep it alive, together with all the other tropes about how to handle Russia and why an end to the war can never be contemplated.
Of course, that position may have been sustainable while Joe Biden was still in power and the US were arguably more gung-ho about pushing an unwinnable war in Europe.
But Donald Trump’s devastating take-down of Zelensky in the White House will force a reckoning on the European policy establishment about what to do for Ukraine, and for Zelensky. Kaja Kallas has neither the diplomacy, the democratic mandate, nor the plan to chart a credible way forward.
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