Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called for Europe to “wake up” and build its own defence policy following a shift by the United States over Ukraine.
This week US President Donald Trump upended America’s policy on the Ukraine war, denouncing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as a “dictator” and suggesting Kyiv started the three-year war between Ukraine and Russia.
Reuters report that the US and Russia held peace talks in Saudi Arabia this week without Ukraine, stunning Kyiv and its European allies.
Trump warned that Zelenskiy needs to be quick to secure peace or he’ll risk losing his country, deepening a feud between the two that has alarmed European officials.
Ukraine said it will not accept a deal imposed on it without its consent, which other European leaders agree with but Russia won’t concede land it has won.
Mitstoakis said that Europe needed to “wake up from the geopolitical and economic lethargy into which it has unfortunately fallen for some time” during a business conference in Thessaloniki on Wednesday.
“Recent developments and this different view of things from the United States now oblige us not only to face the truth, but to move at a very high speed and implement decisions that we have been discussing for long,” he said.
He pointed to Europe setting up a defence policy to allow it to reduce reliance on the US.
Europe has relied heavily on the US within NATO for security and Trump has consistently demanded Europe spend more on defence and provide more military muscle but experts say Europe would be stretched to do so without US assistance.
This comes as Greece and other NATO members undertake their largest combat exercises of 2025, testing their ability to deploy forces on the 32-nation alliance’s eastern border as US worries grow.
