NATO General & EU Officials Submit Peace Proposal. EU Silent. | M. v.d. Schulenburg

## US-Russia track and Europe as spoiler Four years into the full-scale war on European soil, the contours of diplomacy have narrowed to a bilateral corridor between Washington and Moscow — and Europe has largely become a bystander, sometimes a spoiler. The conversation around a recent peace initiative, drafted by a coalition of German thinkers and a former senior NATO general and relayed to EU leadership, underlined an uncomfortable truth: when the US and Russia engage or contemplate engagement at a strategic level, European policymakers often find themselves reduced to implementing or resisting outcomes crafted elsewhere. This dynamic not only diminishes Europe’s room for maneuver; it warps the incentives for forging a European-led settlement that could better reflect continental realities. What emerges from the discussion is a model of diplomacy that treats Europe as the theatre and the United States and Russia as the primary choreographers. That model has advantages and liabilities. On one hand, US engagement can provide the strategic leverage needed to alter Moscow’s calculus. On the other, it can sideline European preferences, producing agreements that may either overcommit Europeans to security structures they did not help shape or lock them into policies that exacerbate regional division. The peace proposal discussed by Michael von der Schulenburg and his colleagues sought to re-center Europe in conversations about its own security — to transform Europeans from spectators into principal actors. Yet the reaction from EU institutions has been muted, illustrating the deeply embedded transatlantic hierarchy in security affairs and the political cost of challenging it. Europe’s role as a potential spoiler — by either obstructing or failing to constructively engage in US-Russia talks — is less the result of coherent strategy than of political paralysis and risk aversion. Decision-makers who publicly insist that only one sovereign — Vladimir Putin, in contemporary parlance — can end the conflict, effectively relinquish agency. The consequence is predictable: where Washington and Moscow find rhythm, Brussels is left crafting rhetorical alignments that paper over the absence of a pragmatic continental policy. The peace proposal calls for reversing that dynamic — not by marginalizing transatlantic relations, but by reclaiming the legitimacy to negotiate a European security architecture jointly with Russia, thereby reducing the pressure on Europe to choose between alignment and autonomy. ## Military realism and silencing peace voices One of the starkest themes in the exchange is how military realism and a politicized culture of moral absolutism have stifled voices calling for negotiation. The climate within European institutions and media, as described in the conversation, prize rhetorical purity — a binary framing of winners and losers, justice and villainy — that equates compromise with betrayal. This moralization of policy has a silencing effect: politicians and analysts who advocate negotiation are painted as appeasers; those who urge restraint or propose pragmatic, territory-sensitive arrangements are accused of capitulation. Military realism, properly understood, does not celebrate conflict but recognizes that war is an instrument driven by interests and capabilities, and that outcomes are determined on the battlefield as well as the negotiating table. The peace proposal’s authors — among them a former top NATO general with direct experience in Russia-NATO forums — emphasize that negotiations must start from the material realities produced by the conflict. Where the military balance has shifted, insisting on maximalist, non-negotiable objectives risks prolonging suffering and risking state collapse. The discussion points to the paradox that the louder the moral thunder about “justice,” the harder it becomes to engage in the very hard-headed bargaining that can stop killing. Silencing peace advocates is not a mere rhetorical problem; it has institutional consequences. When political majorities in assemblies routinely vote for resolutions that harden conflict narratives, they entrench policies that prioritize armament over dialogue. That creates incentives for military escalation, arms transfers, and the marginalization of negotiation channels. The conversation stresses that this posture benefits those who profit politically and economically from continuation, not those who shoulder the costs on the ground — civilians, soldiers, and displaced populations. Reintroducing peace advocacy into mainstream policymaking requires dismantling the taboo around negotiation and restoring the legitimacy of compromise as a tool of pragmatic statecraft. ## Propaganda lock-in and breaking the frame Propaganda and the mutual reinforcement of demonizing narratives on both sides form another structural barrier to peace. The participants described how wartime storytelling — the depiction of the adversary as a uniquely monstrous enemy — hardens public opinion and cascades into policy. It creates a lock-in: once a society has accepted a monolithic, dehumanizing frame of the opponent, policymakers find it politically costly to pursue engagement that appears to humanize or accommodate them. Breaking that frame requires both political courage and new communicative strategies. The peace proposal recommends a language shift: frame negotiations not as victory or defeat contests but as a shared European responsibility to secure a safer future for all inhabitants of the continent, including Ukrainians and Russians. This narrative repositioning is not about exculpating wrongdoing; it is about creating a common horizon for pragmatic problem-solving. The Paris Charter of 1990, often invoked in the conversation, offers a pre-existing normative vocabulary for such an approach — an agreement that conceived European security as indivisible and not to be organized through exclusionary military blocs. Yet the Charter has been neglected, its ideals sidelined by decades of geopolitical rivalry and, more recently, by a politics of grievance. Propaganda lock-in also intersects with the digital media environment. Platforms that amplify outrage and punish nuance reward simplistic moral framings. The conversation suggests that countering this requires credible, high-level endorsements of negotiation, accompanied by clear outlines of safeguarding mechanisms: territorial propositions, security guarantees, and institutional oversight. If influential figures — from seasoned diplomats to military officials — are willing to publicly articulate a plausible route to negotiated settlement, the narrative constraints can loosen. But this will only happen if institutions are prepared to tolerate the political cost of reframing the debate. ## Backchannel attempts and Ukraine collapse risk The transcript sheds light on discreet backchannel diplomacy and the danger that a collapse of Ukrainian state capacity could unleash catastrophic political consequences. Informal tracks, including high-level presidential contacts and discreet discussions, have been glimpsed over the past year, indicating that both great-power capitals understand the necessity of dialogue even as they publicly posture for maximal advantage. These backchannels are the thin ice on which any eventual negotiated arrangement might be built. They allow parties to explore options without committing politically to outcomes that would be rejected in highly charged domestic arenas. Yet these shadowy efforts face a dual risk: they can be foreclosed by intransigent public postures, and they can be overtaken by developments on the ground, especially if Ukrainian defenses deteriorate. The conversation warns that the collapse of an army can precipitate the collapse of political order — a point with immediate human and geopolitical implications. If the Ukrainian state were to fragment under military pressure, the ensuing vacuum could produc

NATO General & EU Officials Submit Peace Proposal. EU Silent. | Schulenburg After 4 years of all-out war in Europe it is high time for peace. A german alliance of thinkers, journalists and a former Ex-NATO General have submitted a proposal to finally end the bloody Ukraine war. But the EU is still immovable. I’m joined again by Michael von der Schulenburg, Member of the European Parliament and longtime UN/OSCE peace negotiator. We talk on the fourth anniversary of the full-scale Russia-Ukraine war and the uncomfortable gap between public war rhetoric and the hard limits of real diplomacy. Michael explains the peace proposal his group drafted, the letters sent to EU leaders, and the political climate that treats negotiation itself like a taboo. We also dig into collapsed arms control, the fading “red lines” of nuclear risk, and the way Ukraine’s future gets discussed in rooms far from the front. Links: Europe Needs Peace: https://michael-von- der-schulenburg.com/europa-braucht-jetzt-den-mut-zum-frieden/ Open Letters to Kaja Kallas and Roberta Metsola: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-kaja-kallas-and-roberta Michael von der Schulenburg (website): https://michael-von-der-schulenburg.com/ Michael von der Schulenburg (European Parliament profile): https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/256966 /MICHAEL_VON%2BDER%2BSCHULENBURG/home Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz. substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack. com/s/academic) Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00: 00:00 Anniversary setting and opening stakes 00:01:40 Letters to EU leaders and peace proposal 00: 06:38 OSCE vision, Paris Charter, ignored security 00:12:20 Deadlock mindset and endings in past wars 00:19:41 US-Russia track and Europe as spoiler 00:26:20 Military realism and silencing peace voices 00:33:22 Propaganda lock-in and breaking the frame 00:37:10 Backchannel attempts and Ukraine collapse risk 00:45:21 Where the letters will be published and close #Pascal Hello everybody, and welcome back to Neutrality Studies. My name is Pascal Lottaz. I'm an associate professor at Kyoto University, and I'm joined today again by Michael von der Schulenburg, a European member of parliament and one of Europe's most ardent voices for peace with Russia and peace with the world. He's someone who has been working for decades in the United Nations system, promoting peace initiatives between various parties. He's here today on the very sad occasion of the fourth anniversary of the full-scale war between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO. Michael, welcome back. #Schulenburg -- 1 of 16 -- Yeah, thank you very much. It's actually almost unbelievable as we speak today. You know, last night we had a lot of snow here—more snow than I've seen in probably the last ten years. I'm here in Austria, and it's a beautiful country with all this snow. Everything is white; we have about twenty centimeters of it. And it's very peaceful. You know, snow makes everything feel peaceful. It appears very calm. And yet we have all these wars going on around us. It's actually a bit unreal, talking now about the anniversary—the sad anniversary, we have to say—of the Ukraine war. Yeah, what do you think, Pascal? #Pascal I mean, war is all around us. The war with Iran is around us. But the war—the four-year war with Ukraine—has been going on, and the slaughter is unimaginable. We still don't have the numbers; we still don't actually know how many people have really died. But the only thing that's sure is that it's in the hundreds of thousands, likely in the millions. And you just wrote—or, as this video will be released, you will have published—letters to Kaja Kallas and the president of the EU Parliament, I believe. Can you tell us what you’re telling them and what you’ve been doing over the last couple of days? #Schulenburg Because of the fourth anniversary, a group of Germans and I sat together and wrote a proposal for how Europe could negotiate peace with Russia. The argument we make is that the situation in Europe is really bad now—especially in the European Union, economically. From a geopolitical point of view, we have no influence anymore. We have all these wars around us. It’s not only the war with Iran; it’s also the wars involving Israel and those in West Africa. We have problems within the transatlantic alliance. So I think Europe is in a really, really different situation. And the argument we make is that if we want to get out of this... #Pascal The first thing we have to do is bring peace back to the European continent. #Schulenburg And that’s, of course, the Ukraine war. The Ukraine war has an enormous influence on us and on our future generations. It will determine how we’re going to live in it. And I think if we want to have peace on the continent, we have to start talking with Russia. So what we prepared—and very interesting people participated in it—includes General Kujat. He used to be the highest-ranking German general at one time, also in NATO. He was chairperson of the Russia-NATO Council and the Russia-Ukraine Council. So he’s very much aware of this, and I do a lot of work with him. -- 2 of 16 -- We have Mr. Teltschik, who was the advisor to Kohl at the time of unification—a foreign policy advisor. We have Peter Brandt, the son of Willy Brandt, who is now a political scientist. We have Hajo Kwiatk, a very important political scientist who used to be in the Green Party, though not anymore for about a year. And, of course, Mr. Lottaz is a journalist, and I myself worked for 34 years in war zones. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge, and we prepared this. Just to say—you prepared a peace proposal. Now you’re talking about the peace proposal. #Pascal You sent it to all parties. #Schulenburg Well, it’s been published. We released it in January, ahead of the fourth anniversary. We thought, you know, the fourth anniversary should remind us that we can’t just sit back and do nothing—we have to act. So we came up with this proposal. It’s the only one of its kind in Europe. Don’t forget, we had never made a peace proposal before. And it’s very professionally written because, I mean, we’re quite experienced in these kinds of things. We talk a lot about territory, about security guarantees, about the strength of the army, and about future relations—both in Ukraine and in Europe. So it’s something that should be taken seriously. But the important thing we emphasize—the key argument—is that when we start talking to Russia, we should take a positive approach, because there’s so much hatred, so much bad language, and things like that. So we suggest appealing to Russia on the basis that the European Union and Russia, as two European political entities, share a joint responsibility for Ukraine and for what happens in Europe. We argue that we should do this—very differently from what the Americans do—by setting clear objectives for why we sit together. And I think these objectives are relatively easy to agree on, like asking: what is the future of Ukraine as an independent, sovereign state in Europe? And, of course, another question is: what will the peace and security arrangements for Europe look like? These are European issues on which both sides could at least agree that this is the objective of the negotiations. That’s how you do it in negotiations, you know. And then, of course, both sides will disagree on the details—they’ll disagree on what it means. But at least we have a positive footing to go back to, and we don’t have this kind of language. We don’t have negotiations between losers and winners; we have negotiations between European parties who say, “Things have gone terribly wrong, and we have to think—what is the future now for Ukraine? What is the future for Europe?” #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here, but also to my mailing list on Substack—that’s pascallottaz.substack.com. The link’s in the description below. And -- 3 of 16 -- now, back to the video. For four years, we didn’t have a positive vision of what Europe could work toward. The Russians, I must say, have been saying the whole time that what they demand is a security structure—some sort of security arrangement for the continent. The Europeans haven’t said no to it; they’ve just ignored it. Why do you think it is that this obviously positive proposal from Russia—to have a joint security structure—is something the Europeans are silent on? In your dealings with your colleagues in Parliament, why don’t they react to something that could be used to create progress? #Schulenburg You know, Pascal, it's even more astonishing if you think that in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, we all agreed on an international treaty called the Paris Charter for a New Europe. And in this charter, we agreed that we would not have military blocs dividing us. If you have a joint structure, security cannot be divided. It even went so far as to say that we are all obliged, in our security arrangements, to do nothing that would threaten the other side. And then we did exactly the opposite in 1992, when the Soviet Union broke apart. We didn’t follow this anymore. Now, if you read the Charter of Paris—an OSCE document—it’s international law. I mean, these things are international law because they’re deposited with the UN Security Council, so they still apply. And if we followed this, we’d basically have a sketch of what Europe could look like after this war. But we ignore it. We ignore these kinds of things. And why we do this, I don’t know, because it’s basically against our own interests. I mean, our economy is doing badly, we have the highest energy costs in the world, and we’re losing industry. Europe has virtually no foreign policy influence anymore—what happens in Iran or in other parts of the world—and I think that's the result of it. So I don't even understand why we behave the way we do. I just don't understand it. And if I look at the language in the parliament, where regularly between 500 and 600 deputies out of 720 vote for resolutions that want to continue the war, de facto, the language is one of hatred. And, you know, for someone like me—I’ve seen wars all my life—I haven’t even seen such language during the Iran-Iraq war. I mean, I’ve never seen a war in which both parties had no contact at all. Usually, you have some, even if not directly. I mean, in the Iran-Iraq war, about a million people died. It was a huge war, but it was handled through the United Nations. I was on the Iranian side, at the UN, and there was always something to discuss. This time, we don’t have that. It’s unbelievable. We’re seeing, at the same time, a breakdown of international law. You know, basically, Trump thinks he’s not bound by treaties anymore, by international law—and we’re kind of saying almost the same thing now. So we don’t really have international law that applies anymore, and we have no agreements left on restricting arms. I mean, the last treaty on controlling nuclear weapons—the New START agreement—expired at the beginning of this month, and we have none at all anymore. At a time when these weapons have -- 4 of 16 -- become far more advanced since the 1960s, we don’t have any deals on arms, and this is very, very dangerous. I mean, there’s no red telephone, no confidence-building measures—nothing anymore. But now we have rockets that, in the old days, in the 1960s, would have taken six hours to deliver a nuclear bomb to Russia or vice versa, and now it’s just a few minutes. That’s a very dangerous thing indeed. And we have meetings like the one in Munich, the security conference, and there’s no agreement on this at all. We do it, and this is never really the problem. It’s completely irrationa