While Russia, the United States, and Ukraine quietly negotiated in Abu Dhabi, Davos revealed Europe’s real position in the emerging world order: excluded from decision-making yet burdened with the costs of war and peace alike.

What emerged in the Alpine setting was not coherence but fragmentation: rhetorical excess, strategic confusion, and an unmistakable sense that the world has already moved beyond the frameworks still defended—often ritualistically—by Euro-Atlantic elites.

Three speeches captured this moment with particular clarity: those of Volodymyr Zelensky, Mark Carney, and, less noticed but arguably most consequential, Chinese Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang (represented in the Davos debate through He Lifeng’s economic message).

Zelensky and the Public Humiliation of Europe

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech was striking not only for its confrontational tone but also for its intended audience. His criticism was not primarily directed at Russia or even the United States, but bluntly at Europe. He accused the European Union of strategic indecision, military weakness, and an inability to guarantee Ukraine’s security, reiterating that Europe “still does not know how to defend itself” and remains structurally dependent on Washington.

Mocking Europe’s symbolic troop deployments to Greenland and its delayed reactions to crises such as Iran reinforced Zelensky’s humiliating of Europe.

This rhetoric can be understood as a final reckoning — an all-or-nothing move in which he burned all bridges and launched a frontal attack without regard for the consequences. By Davos, Kyiv was already aware that negotiations over the territorial concessions of the war were being discussed in Abu Dhabi between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine without European participation.

Zelensky’s speech thus functioned as political coercion aimed at Europe as the remaining actor capable of paying the price of a settlement.........

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