Trump and Zelensky understand that reality better than Davos elites.

The easiest story to tell about Europe is that Vladimir Putin outsmarted it.

He built the pipelines. He bought the influence. He played the long game. He invaded Ukraine. Europe froze.

The problem is that story lets Europe off the hook.

Putin didn’t outsmart the European Union. The EU outsmarted itself — by constructing an economic model that treated energy, security, and sovereignty like three unrelated topics you could discuss in separate committees, in separate decades, with separate political consequences.

You can’t.

At Davos this year, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky — for very different reasons and in very different styles — each said the quiet part out loud: Europe’s central vulnerability isn’t Russian cunning. It’s Europe’s own refusal to act like a power.

Trump framed Ukraine as an example of what he calls NATO’s one-way street. He claimed the U.S. has borne enormous costs while Europe lectures, dithers, and freeloads. His argument wasn’t subtle: Ukraine is a European war, and Europe should be carrying far more of the burden.

Zelensky’s message was blunter, and honestly more devastating. He compared Europe’s response to Groundhog Day — the same warnings, the same hand-wringing, the same delays, repeated year after year. He mocked what he called “Greenland mode”: the European habit of waiting for America to decide something, then hoping the crisis passes.

But Zelensky wasn’t just venting. He was describing a strategic disease.

Europe spent the post–Cold War era cashing a peace dividend it didn’t earn. It outsourced military seriousness to the United States, and energy seriousness to Russia. And then it acted shocked when those two realities collided.

Because here’s what Nord Stream was — and everyone knew it at the time:

A bypass around Ukraine.

A leash around Europe.

A pipeline isn’t just steel. It’s leverage. It’s dependency, locked in by infrastructure, contracts, and political denial. Europe didn’t “accidentally” become dependent on Russian energy while Putin slowly moved on Ukraine after 2014. Europe chose it — because it was cheaper, easier, and required no courage.

Then the bill arrived.

Now, European leaders would like to pretend this is a story of redemption. They’ve reduced Russian imports. They’ve talked tough. They’ve sanctioned. They’ve sent weapons. They’ve frozen Russian assets.

But even now, when it comes time to use the tools they already have, Europe finds reasons not to act.

Consider the frozen Russian central bank assets sitting inside Europe — much of them tied up through Euroclear in Belgium. European leaders agreed to lend Ukraine €90 billion for 2026–27. But when the conversation turned to using frozen Russian assets to back a bigger “reparations loan,” the plan ran into a wall of legal fear, financial risk, and internal vetoes.

Belgium’s prime minister put it bluntly: there is “no such thing as free money.” Zelensky put it more sharply: Putin is still fighting for his frozen money — and “having some success.”

That’s the real scandal.

Not that Europe froze the assets. Not that it worried about the legal blowback. But that Europe keeps discovering — in slow motion — that power requires risk, and that strategic mistakes can’t be solved with press releases.

Zelensky made a simple demand at Davos this year: stop pretending sanctions are a moral performance. Treat them as warfare economics. Stop Russia’s shadow fleet. Stop the cashflow. Stop the components feeding missile production. Europe can do these things — but only if it’s willing to act like it means it.

Trump, meanwhile, is forcing the same issue in his own chaotic way: America will not carry a continent forever if that continent refuses to carry itself.

And that’s the Davos truth nobody wants to print on the conference tote bags: Putin didn’t trap Europe; Europe trapped Europe.

And the only thing more expensive than confronting that reality is continuing to avoid it.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)