Paris hosts another round, with a British handover looming

Emmanuel Macron convened the latest Coalition of the Willing summit at the Hôtel des Invalides on Monday, gathering more than twenty European leaders to discuss further support for Ukraine and additional pressure on Russia The Guardian. The timing was deliberate in one sense at least: the meeting fell a day before Bastille Day, with the Élysée's official agenda listing a Coalition of the Willing dinner for Tuesday evening and the Défilé militaire scheduled for 10h00 the same morning Élysée diary.

Macron met Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier in the day ahead of the wider gathering, and the two later joined Germany's Friedrich Merz and Britain's Keir Starmer for a late-afternoon press conference The Guardian. It was the same quartet that last convened in London in December 2025, though the composition carries an asterisk this time: Starmer attended as Britain's outgoing prime minister, a detail the Guardian's live coverage flagged explicitly. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also attended, as the Élysée had confirmed three days earlier alongside Zelenskyy's participation Reuters.

The Coalition of the Willing has by now built up a considerable institutional memory. It first cohered around a September 2025 meeting co-chaired by Macron and Starmer, followed by a co-chairs' declaration in August 2025 involving Starmer and Merz, and a July 2025 pledge of at least €40bn in military support for Ukraine that year Élysée. A January 2026 summit in Paris drew 35 states and was described by the Élysée as achieving unprecedented unity among the coalition, Ukraine and the United States Élysée. Macron raised the format again at the Munich Security Conference in February, and further co-chairs' statements and press releases followed through the spring. An Élysée communiqué dated 8 July had already flagged that Monday's summit would take up "la lutte contre la flotte" — the fight against Russia's shadow fleet — as a specific agenda item Élysée.

The Paris gathering unfolded alongside two parallel diplomatic tracks. In Brussels, EU foreign ministers met the same day to work through the bloc's 21st sanctions package against Russia. Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, said the package had not been signed off, citing "still some open questions" The Guardian. Lithuania's Kęstutis Budrys said member states had not yet settled on a proposed maritime services ban or on tightening restrictions on Russian LNG — measures aimed squarely at the shadow-fleet problem the Élysée had previewed days earlier.

The second track concerned cyber-attribution. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said France would summon the Russian ambassador over an alleged hacking campaign against European states, and announced sanctions on nine individuals and four entities that Barrot attributed to the FSB. The EU issued parallel sanctions on the same nine people and four entities, describing the target as Russia's "malicious cyber ecosystem" directed at the EU, its member states and international partners. The bloc's designation covered activity attributed to Russia's GRU 16th Centre, including cyber-espionage against French strategic governmental entities dating to 2010 and against the French defence industry in 2025, targeting of German governmental networks, and sabotage of Polish critical infrastructure, including combined heat-and-power plants. The affected states named across the campaign included France, Germany, Poland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Romania and Finland. Those sanctioned included GRU intelligence officers, cybercriminals and private firms the EU says contribute to efforts to destabilise the bloc.

The overlap of three separate processes — a leaders' summit in Paris, a sanctions negotiation in Brussels, and a coordinated cyber-attribution announcement — was not obviously choreographed, but it left little doubt that Russia policy is now being managed on multiple fronts simultaneously rather than through a single instrument. Sanctions packages have grown routine enough that a 21st iteration barely registers as news in itself; what matters is whether the maritime and LNG provisions survive the "open questions" Kallas referenced, since those touch the shadow-fleet financing that the Élysée had already singled out for the Paris agenda.

Zelenskyy's bilateral engagement with Macron continues a pattern visible since at least March, when a readout from the Ukrainian presidency described talks covering defense support, European integration, sanctions strengthening and coalition cooperation President of Ukraine. The UK's role as co-lead with France on Ukraine's future security architecture, laid out in a government factsheet in June, sits alongside London's separately signed 100-Year Partnership with Kyiv, detailed in the FCDO's 2024–2025 annual accounts. Whether that co-leadership carries over cleanly through a change of prime minister is the open question Monday's summit did not resolve, and one likely to shape how the coalition functions once Starmer's successor takes the seat Britain has held at this table since the format began.