'Coalition of the Willing' agrees at least one European leader should engage with Russia, Stubb says

The "Coalition of the Willing" has agreed that at least one European leader should engage in dialogue with Russia, Finnish President Alexander Stubb said on April 3.

Stubb suggested that either France or the United Kingdom, as key coalition leaders, should initiate contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"In our discussion with the 'Coalition of the Willing' in Paris on Thursday (March 27), we recognized the reality that a European leader will have to reach out to Russia at some point," Stubb told reporters in Helsinki.

Currently, European leaders are not engaging in negotiations with Putin. Early in the full-scale war, French President Emmanuel Macron and later German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke with Putin, but those discussions yielded no results.

European leaders have also been excluded from recent U.S.-led ceasefire talks with Ukraine and Russia, including the latest meeting in Saudi Arabia on March 25.

The coalition, which consists of countries committed to providing security guarantees and potential peacekeeping forces for Ukraine, held a summit in Paris on March 27. France and the U.K., leading the coalition, have pledged to send troops to Ukraine to enforce a potential ceasefire.

Stubb also said on March 31 that Finland must prepare for the eventual restoration of relations with Russia. He told reporters that U.S. President Donald Trump asked him whether Putin could be trusted, to which he replied that he could not.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on April 1 that Putin was open to normalizing relations with Finland.

Finland, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, joined NATO in 2023 in response to Russia's full-scale invasion. The country shares a 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) border with Russia and has strengthened its defense ties with Western allies since the war began.