The Ukraine war, Russian “ghost” ships and the cutting of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea are the main topics that will dominate this year’s Munich Conference. European leaders worry that Donald Trump may give in to Putin’s demands, while the Munich Conference marks 18 years since Vladimir Putin’s famous 2007 speech, which interrupted the American path of spreading democracy in countries around Russia.
Eighteen years ago, Vladimir Putin became the first Russian leader to address the Munich Security Conference, perhaps the most important annual gathering of the Washington-led transatlantic community that rebuilt and democratized much of Western Europe after World War II and expanded to include Central and Eastern European countries after the Cold War. Putin’s famous speech attacking the “unipolar world,” which he blamed the United States for creating, signaled the beginning of a more confrontational Russian approach to the collective West.
“What is a unipolar world?” the Russian leader asked his audience in Munich. “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign,” Putin said, looking at the shocked Americans in the audience. “And ultimately this is harmful not only for everyone inside this system, but also for the sovereign himself, because he destroys himself from within . . . The unipolar model is not only unacceptable, but also impossible in today’s world.”
What followed his speech in 2007 has had deadly, generational consequences. Russian boys born that year are now old enough to be recruited and sent to fight in what US President Donald Trump recently called the “killing fields” in Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, more than a million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded.
Putin has never hidden his leadership – the invasion of Georgia in 2008, then the seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and an intervention in Syria that kept dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. It’s no wonder Putin thinks he can get away with his deceptive behavior again in the face of a distracted and inconsistent democratic community, the Atlantic Council points out.
The Munich Conference convenes again this year, for the sixty-first time, at an equally important moment. And conference participants can witness history again, set in motion by the newly elected Trump and a flurry of activity aimed at ending Putin's illegal and unprovoked three-year war in Ukraine.
In the Bavarian capital and beyond, it has become a cliché to warn those tempted to appease despots against becoming a modern-day Neville Chamberlain, referring to the British prime minister who signed the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938. That pact handed over the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany, writes A2 CNN.
So it’s no surprise that some European officials arriving in the city are worried that Trump risks falling into the same kind of trap after his ninety-minute phone call with Putin this week. They fear that by negotiating the withdrawal of the 20 percent of Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied, the American president will end immediate hostilities but not Putin’s expansionist ambitions.
Speculation is rife about whether this conference will lead to a diplomatic breakthrough that could set a course to end Russia's war against Ukraine. The US delegation is led by Vice President JD Vance, who was expected to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before speaking on the main stage of this conference.
There is no Russian representative on the official guest list, and Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement that the conference had changed its purpose over the years, turning from a security event into one that supports the “regime in Kiev” and one that she said was involved in implementing security policies that were destructive to Europe’s own security.
For his part, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on whether Washington and Moscow are planning to meet at the Munich conference. "We have nothing to report yet," Peskov was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency TASS. This refutes a claim by US President Donald Trump who said on February 13 that US and Russian officials would meet in Munich on February 14 and that Ukraine had also been invited. Kiev has also said it does not expect such talks to take place in Munich.
In any case, Munich represents a first chance for many European leaders to meet with senior officials of the new administration in Washington, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, writes A2 CNN.
The latter has already caused a stir at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels this week, declaring that under a peace deal, Ukraine could not expect to regain territory occupied by Russia or join NATO. Amid a bitter response from Europe, some commentators described the proposals as setting the stage for a second Munich Agreement -- a reference to the 1938 agreement under which Britain and France bowed to Nazi Germany's demands for part of Czechoslovakia.
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