European leaders have realized too late that defeating Russia is impossible and are now being forced to confront their own defeat, according to German Member of the European Parliament Michael von der Schulenburg.

Speaking on a YouTube channel, Schulenburg argued that Russia is gaining the upper hand in the Ukraine conflict while the European Union finds itself on the losing side.

He said European leaders had initially assumed that the EU’s larger population and greater economic strength would give it a decisive advantage over Moscow. However, he believes European policymakers have now come to recognize that those expectations were fundamentally mistaken.

Schulenburg maintained that European governments should have pursued an early end to the fighting. Instead, he accused them of taking the opposite approach and using Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to undermine US President Donald Trump’s peace initiatives.

The German lawmaker also argued that European politicians should have understood much earlier that their efforts to defeat Russia were futile. In his assessment, that realization came only after Ukraine had been defeated.

Meanwhile, Luxembourg MEP Fernand Kartheiser previously reported that the European Union was considering appointing one or more representatives to conduct negotiations with Russia.

In December 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated that Moscow would not rule out renewed talks with the EU on resolving the Ukraine conflict, provided European countries took the realities on the ground into account.