Simon Gros

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The event can be read as an attempt to convert a familiar diplomatic lament into a diagnostically organized indictment of European agency. The speech treats political paralysis as a repeatable form of life, and then tests that claim by moving across disparate crises—Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, frozen assets, sanctions, tribunals, maritime oil flows—so that “Europe” appears as a unity chiefly through the pattern of its deferrals, its internal veto points, and its dependence on a U.S. decision-cycle.

Zelenskyy’s first gesture is a rhetorical refusal of the forum’s tendency to treat recurrence as continuity. He starts with a pop-cultural reference—Groundhog Day—and immediately insists that no one would choose to live by repetition “for weeks, months, and of course for years.” The relevant point is not the film itself but the implied ontology of political time: recurrence appears as a failure of learning, and thus as a failure of agency. By stating “that’s exactly how we live now,” he installs repetition as the event’s governing form. The forum “proves it,” he says, because a year ago at Davos he closed by saying “Europe needs to know how to defend itself,” and “a year has passed and nothing has changed.” This is an accusation with a specific logical structure. It treats an utterance from last year as a test-condition, and the present scene as its measurement. The forum is no longer merely a platform; it becomes an instrument that records the persistence of the same normative deficit. In this way, the event’s own continuity across annual meetings is converted into evidence against the audience’s self-conception: Davos is recoded from a site of solution-making into a site that makes visible the ritualization of non-solution.

From that opening, the speech moves by a sequence of “points” and “next point” transitions that function like a compressed table of contents. The form is noteworthy because it mimics administrative order while narrating administrative incapacity. Each “point” offers a case where the world “turned attention” somewhere, “there was so much talk,” leaders “are not sure what to do,” and Europe either waits for America or returns from holidays too late. The recurrence motif thus becomes a method: the speech will not argue paralysis as a psychological disposition alone; it will reconstruct it as a repeatable procedure that has identifiable stages—attention, talk, delay, reliance on external initiative, and belated posture-formation.

The first case, “Greenland,” is introduced as something “everyone turned attention to,” with the added claim that most leaders “simply are not sure what to do about it.” What matters inside the speech’s economy is the stance Europe is said to take: “waiting for America to cool down,” hoping the issue will dissipate. Greenland is used as a pure instance of externalization: the European political class is portrayed as measuring its own permissible action-space by fluctuations in U.S. affect and agenda. Even at this early stage, the speech’s conceptual wager is clear. Europe’s agency is pictured as a derivative variable; America’s mood is treated as an independent variable. The rhetorical question “But what if [it] will not? What then?” is less a request for policy detail than a demand that Europe represent itself as capable of responding to persistence.

The second case—protests in Iran—intensifies the moral register and also clarifies the temporal critique. “So much talk,” he says, yet the protests “drowned in blood,” and “the world has not helped enough.” The crucial detail is the holiday sequence: “In Europe, there was Christmas and New Year celebrations,” and “by the time politicians came back to work” the “Ayatala has already killed thousands.” In the speech’s logic, Europe’s calendar becomes an instrument of violence by omission: institutional downtime is transposed into political latency, and latency is represented as a causal contributor to irreversible outcomes. Zelenskyy then poses the political-ontological question “what will Iran become after this bloodshed?” and immediately supplies an inferential bridge: if the regime survives, it broadcasts a general rule to “every bully”—kill enough and you stay in power. This is the speech’s first explicit move from a descriptive report to a generalized principle of international order. It is also a move that positions Europe as a consumer of such signals: “Who in Europe needs that message to become a reality?” The question presupposes that Europe is vulnerable to lessons taught by successful repression. The deeper claim is that Europe’s security is bound to global exemplars of impunity, and that Europe’s delayed action is one of the conditions of that exemplarization.

At this point, Europe’s paralysis is no longer merely an inability to decide; it becomes a failure to generate deterrent meaning in the world. The speech consistently treats meaning as produced by action, and produced quickly. Talk that does not culminate in action is presented as politically inert. The forum’s own discursive abundance is thereby placed under suspicion: words circulate while outcomes harden elsewhere.

The Venezuela example is then introduced in a strikingly different tone: “President Trump led an operation in Venezuela and Madura was arrested,” with acknowledgement of “different opinions,” and the assertion that “the fact remains” Madura is “on trial in New York.” This is presented as an emblem of decisiveness, and it is immediately paired with the line “Putin is not on trial.” The comparison is rhetorically sharp because it mobilizes the same speaker who is earlier treated as Europe’s necessary “backstop” and later as an object of European courtship. Here Trump’s action is offered as a contrast-case of speed, coercive capability, and juridical follow-through. Zelenskyy then produces a normative shock: this is “the fourth year of the biggest war in Europe since World War II,” and the initiator is “not only free,” he is “still fighting for his frozen money in Europe.” The speech’s problematics becomes visible here: Europe is portrayed as simultaneously capable of freezing assets and incapable of converting that freeze into punitive direction. The freeze exists, and Zelenskyy thanks the EU leadership—“Thanks Ursula. Thanks Antonio and all the leaders”—for deciding to freeze assets “indefinitely.” Gratitude is not merely politeness; it functions as a concession that stabilizes his critique as intra-allied rather than hostile. Yet the concession is immediately used to sharpen a distinction between formal restraint and operative power. When the time came to use the assets “to defend against Russian aggression,” “the decision was blocked.” “Putin managed this,” he says, and glosses that as “managed to stop Europe.” The speech thereby attributes agency to Putin in the domain of European internal decision-making. The claim is not simply that Europe failed; it is that Europe can be acted upon, halted, by the adversary, through the manipulation of Europe’s own veto-structures and political hesitations.

This is one of the event’s key conceptual moves: it treats the European polity as a site where external adversarial agency can be realized as internal procedural blockage. Europe’s sovereignty, in this depiction, is penetrable by the very mechanisms that are supposed to embody democratic caution and legal scruple. A polity that cannot convert its own formal decisions into operative consequences is presented as offering the adversary a second battlefield: the space of committees, legal interpretations, coalition constraints, electoral sensitivities, and intra-European rivalries.

The next sequence shifts from assets to justice, and from justice to Europe’s prioritization habits. Zelenskyy invokes avoidance of the International Criminal Court topic “because of America’s position,” calling it “understandable” as “American historical position.” This is a careful rhetorical handling: it acknowledges U.S. exceptionalism toward international criminal jurisdiction without turning that into the primary indictment. Yet the speech uses that acknowledgement to display a broader absence: “still no real progress” on a “special tribunal for Russian aggression.” He notes “an agreement,” “many meetings,” but Europe “hasn’t reached even the point of having a home for the tribunal with staff and actual work happening inside.” The phrase “home” is conceptually rich: it is an image of institutional embodiment, materialization, offices, archives, procedures, budgets. In his diagnostic scheme, Europe excels at verbal agreement and at meetings; it fails at instituting. The question “What’s missing? Time or political will” frames the problem as one of internal motivation rather than external constraint. Time is the neutral resource; will is the political substance. The speech then generalizes again: “Too often in Europe, something else is always more urgent than justice.” In terms of event-structure, this is a transition from the juridical domain to the meta-domain of European priority-setting. Justice here is not merely a moral ideal; it becomes a measure of political seriousness, an index of whether Europe can bind itself to long-run institutional projects that do not produce immediate electoral dividends.

From justice, Zelenskyy pivots to the practicalities of security guarantees and ceasefire enforcement. He states that work is ongoing “with partners on security guarantees,” expressing gratitude, but clarifies these are “for after the war ends.” He then outlines what would follow a ceasefire: “contingents and joint patrols and partner flags on Ukrainian soil,” and praises the signal that “UK and France” are “ready to actually commit their forces on the ground,” mentioning a “first agreement,” and thanking “Ke” and “Emanuel” and leaders in “our coalition.” Here the speech introduces an emergent institutional form: a “coalition of the willing,” which he immediately seeks to transform into a “coalition of action.” The language indicates that, in the event’s own framing, there exists a gap between willingness and enactment, between symbolic declarations and operational commitments. Yet even as he pushes that coalition toward action, he introduces the statement that functions as one of the speech’s recurring constraints: “the backstop of President Trump is needed,” and “no security guarantees work without the US.”

This is an explicit contradiction only if one assumes that European autonomy is the speech’s sole aim. Inside the speech’s own logic, the relationship is more dialectical: Europe’s failure is described as dependence, but the remedy is not immediate severance from the United States. The remedy is Europe’s capacity to act as a co-principal in a system where the United States remains decisive. The event thus demands that the audience hold a difficult structure in view: Europe must become a “great power together” and simultaneously must operate within a security architecture where U.S. commitment is still treated as a necessary condition for credible guarantees. The speech does not resolve this tension by theoretical argument; it uses it as pressure. Europe’s task is not to deny the U.S. role; Europe’s task is to cease using the U.S. role as the justification for European passivity.

This is the point at which the speech’s evidential method becomes more overtly operational. Zelenskyy asks, regarding ceasefire itself: “Who can help make it happen?” He then states, with a broad generalization, that Europe “loves to discuss the future” and “avoids taking action today,” and adds that present action “defines what kind of future we will have.” The speech’s time-conception now appears as a principle: futurity is produced, not awaited. A future is not an object to be predicted; it is an object to be manufactured by present force. Within that conception, Europe’s discussion of future is an evasion because it displaces the site of responsibility away from present capacities.

The next example, “shadow fleet” tankers and oil, functions as a concrete site where present action could be taken. Zelenskyy asks why Trump can “stop tankers” and “seize oil” but Europe cannot. He asserts that Russian oil is transported “right along European shores,” that it “funds the war,” and that it “helps destabilize Europe.” The prescription is direct: the oil “must be stopped and confiscated and sold for Europe’s benefit.” The argument is constructed as a simple conditional: if Putin has no money, there is no war “for Europe”; if Europe has money, it can protect its people. The speech thereby treats economic coercion as both a war-ending tool and a self-financing security mechanism. It is not merely that sanctions are morally justified; sanctions are presented as a way for Europe to convert its geographic and regulatory proximity into material power.

At the level of rhetorical form, this section shows how the speech uses why questions to shame and to specify. “Why not?” is not an invitation to policy seminar; it is a demand that Europe own the answer as a confession of its own inhibitions. Those inhibitions are left implicit here, but will later be made explicit as internal European quarrels and diplomatic taboos. For now, oil stands as the paradigmatic case where European inaction cannot be explained by lack of means. The oil is physically near; the legal apparatus of sanctions exists; the money flow is visible. The only missing element, in the speech’s framing, is decision.

From oil, Zelenskyy returns to the foundational theme: “Europe needs united armed forces,” forces that can “truly defend Europe.” He states that Europe relies “only on the belief” that “if danger comes, NATO will act.” He then says “no one has really seen the alliance in action,” and asks: if Putin takes Lithuania or strikes Poland, “who will respond?” He answers indirectly: NATO exists thanks to the belief that the United States “will act,” “will not stand aside,” “will help.” Yet he introduces the counterfactual question that he claims inhabits the minds of “every European leader”: what if it does not? The speech thus treats NATO’s deterrence as partly imaginary, or at least as untested in the specific scenario of direct attack on certain members under conditions of American ambivalence. This is not a doctrinal critique of NATO; it is a psychological critique of European reliance on faith. The speech later culminates in the formula “Faith is not enough,” and this section prepares that culmination by describing the alliance as a belief-structure more than as an enacted certainty.

He then lists the reactions European leaders have: some try to get closer to Trump; some wait; some act by investing in weapons production, building partnerships, and seeking public support for higher defense spending. Yet he adds that, until America pressured Europe, most countries were not even trying to reach 5% of GDP, which he calls “the minimum needed to ensure security.” Whether that number is empirically grounded is not established; what matters is how the number functions rhetorically. It concretizes insufficiency and gives the critique a metric. A critique with a metric is less easily dissolved into mere rhetoric. In the speech’s internal economy, the metric is a provocation: it is meant to force Europe to represent its defense commitments as measurable obligations rather than as values-talk.

The Greenland motif returns here in a sharper, more militarized form. Zelenskyy asks: if you send “40 or 40 soldiers to Greenland,” what is that for, what message does it send to Putin, to China, and “even more importantly” what message does it send to Denmark, “your close ally.” He then proposes a binary: either declare that European bases will protect the region and establish those bases, or risk not being taken seriously because “soldiers will not protect anything.” The logic is that symbolic deployments without credible scale or doctrine are worse than inaction, because they create an image of seriousness while offering no deterrent reality. Here the speech’s critique of Europe becomes a critique of European symbolism: the performance of commitment is treated as an alternative to commitment itself.

In a striking escalation, Zelenskyy then offers Ukraine as a provider of Arctic maritime defense: if Russian warships sail around Greenland, “Ukraine can help,” and he claims Ukraine has “the expertise and weapons” to ensure “not one of those ships remains,” and that they can sink near Greenland “just as they do near Crimea.” The passage is rhetorically aggressive, and it carries a deep institutional irony: Ukraine possesses operational maritime lethality, yet is excluded from NATO; Europe sends token forces; the alliance that could incorporate Ukraine does not. Zelenskyy explicitly marks this as conditional: Ukraine could take actions “if we were asked and if Ukraine were in NATO,” but “we are not.” This is a carefully designed pressure point: Europe wants security, Ukraine can produce security effects, but the institution that would unify those capacities remains closed. The passage thus converts the NATO membership question from a Ukrainian aspiration into a European self-contradiction.

The speech then loops back to Iran and global democracy-support, asserting that Europe offers “nothing” and does not want to enter the issue as a supporter of Iranian people and democracy. He states that refusing to help people fighting for freedom yields consequences that return, and he offers Belarus 2020 as example: no one helped, and now Russian missiles are deployed in Belarus within range of European capitals. He asserts this would not have happened if Belarusian people had “won” in 2020. Again, the speech does not provide the empirical chain; what it provides is the structural claim: Europe’s omissions in one theater materialize as hard military facts in another. Europe’s geographic security is portrayed as the aggregate of its prior choices about supporting democratic movements. This is a broad conception of security as moral-political causality. Within that conception, “values” are not merely rhetorical ornaments; they are causal levers that, when left unused, become vulnerabilities.

At this stage Zelenskyy introduces the phrase “Greenland mode” as a generalized description of European waiting: “Maybe someday someone will do something.” The term functions as a concept inside the speech: it names a pattern in which Europe treats crises as weather—something that might change if one waits. The speech’s ambition is to destroy that concept by making it shameful and by showing its costs.

The sanctions section then returns, now with more detail. He concedes it is good that many sanctions exist and that Russian oil is getting cheaper, but he insists the flow has not stopped and companies funding the war machine still work. He states this will not change without more sanctions, and thanks pressure already applied. Yet he says Europe must do more so that its sanctions block enemies as effectively as American sanctions. The repeated comparison with America again performs a double function: it humiliates Europe as less capable, and it implies that capability exists in the shared Western toolkit, so European incapacity is not inevitable. It is chosen, or at least tolerated.

He then states a general principle: if Europe is not seen as a global force, if its actions do not scare bad actors, Europe will always be reacting and catching up. Here fear is treated as a legitimate political output: deterrence requires being feared by aggressors. A Europe that is loved for culture but not feared for capacity becomes strategically irrelevant. The language “beautiful but fragmented kaleidoscope of small and middle powers” gives aesthetic praise while diagnosing political weakness. The kaleidoscope image is crucial: it suggests continual rearrangement of parts, colorful, pleasing, and structurally unstable. Europe’s plurality is aestheticized because it is not synthesized into a single will. The speech thus treats Europe’s diversity as something that, without unity, becomes spectacle rather than force.

The internal-enemy motif appears next: he says forces trying to destroy Europe operate freely, even inside Europe, and that “every victor who lives off European money while trying to sell out European interests deserves a smack upside the hat.” The phrase is colloquial and breaks the otherwise formal register, functioning as a moment of performative anger. It also functions structurally as evidence that the speech is not merely prepared text; it is delivered with affect, and the affect signals the stakes Zelenskyy assigns to internal complicity. The speech then warns that if someone feels comfortable in Moscow, Europe should not let European capitals become “little Moscows.” This is not a claim about cultural similarity; it is a claim about political capture, corruption, and the normalization of authoritarian influence.

Then comes one of the speech’s most explicit lines: “We must remember what separates Russia from all of us.” He defines the “most fundamental line of conflict” as Russia’s fight “to devalue people,” to ensure that when dictators want to destroy someone, they can. He then asserts dictators “must lose power, not gain it.” This is a normative anthropology: political order is defined by whether persons are treated as having value that constrains power. Russia is described as pursuing a regime where persons are devalued, and devaluation enables destruction. Europe is implicitly described as committed to the opposite, yet the speech’s earlier claims about Europe’s inaction in Iran, Belarus, and Ukraine imply that Europe’s commitment remains insufficiently enacted. The speech thus suggests that Europe’s failure is not that it lacks values, but that it fails to translate them into coercive reality against devaluation regimes.

From this anthropological claim, Zelenskyy shifts to the technical domain of sanctions circumvention and missile production. He says Russia’s missiles are produced because there are ways to bypass sanctions. He describes Russia trying to freeze Ukrainians to death at minus 20°C, then claims Russia could not build ballistic or cruise missiles without critical components from other countries, and insists it is not only China: components come from companies in Europe, the United States, and Taiwan. This is one of the speech’s most consequential boundary-setting moves about responsibility. It refuses a simple narrative where Europe’s role is only to support Ukraine against Russia. Europe is implicated materially in Russia’s war production through supply chains. The speech then observes that many invest in stability around Taiwan to avoid war, but asks whether Taiwanese companies can stop contributing electronics to Russia’s war. He says Europe says almost nothing, America says nothing, and Putin makes missiles.

Here the speech performs a reversal in the typical hierarchy of causes. Instead of treating Russia’s capacity as a given and sanctions as a secondary pressure, it treats sanctions enforcement and supply-chain discipline as a primary determinant of Russia’s capacity. Military facts are re-described as trade facts. This is consistent with the earlier oil section: money flows and components flows are treated as the hidden infrastructure of aggression. The speech thereby requires its audience to see itself as inhabiting the same causal network as the war, rather than as an external moral spectator.

He thanks countries and companies that help Ukraine repair its energy system and mentions support for purchasing Patriot missiles. Yet he then asks whether it would not be “cheaper and easier” to cut Russia off from components or destroy factories making missiles. This is a classic Zelenskyy move in: it takes a praised form of support and treats it as unnecessarily expensive relative to a more direct intervention. The implication is not merely budgetary; it is moral and strategic. If Europe is willing to pay for defense after the fact, why is it unwilling to prevent production at the source? The speech then adds that last year time was spent talking about long-range weapons for Ukraine and everyone said the solution was “within range,” and now no one talks about it though missiles and drones still strike and Ukraine still has coordinates of factories. The structure is again Groundhog Day: the same discourse cycles, then disappears, while the underlying production continues. The event’s critique of Europe is mirrored by a critique of Western agenda volatility: topics become fashionable and then taboo, even when the material necessity remains.

He then gives explicit examples of taboo-management: in Europe, “we are advised not to mention Tomahawks” to Americans “not to spoil the mood,” and told not to bring up Taurus missiles when subject is Turkey, and diplomats say do not offend Greece, be careful with Turkey. He concludes there are endless internal arguments and things left unsaid that stop Europe from uniting and speaking honestly enough to find solutions. This is perhaps the most direct articulation of the speech’s thesis about Europe as a system of mutual inhibition. The inhibition is not only fear of Russia; it is fear of each other, fear of offending allies, fear of disrupting diplomatic atmospheres. The speech portrays Europe as a space where politeness becomes a strategic constraint, and where the maintenance of mood substitutes for the pursuit of outcomes.

The implication is that Europe’s discourse is governed by a tacit ethics of non-disturbance that, under conditions of war, becomes complicity. Zelenskyy does not explicitly theorize this as a moral failure of civility; he shows it as a procedural norm that blocks the articulation of necessary options. The taboo examples are crucial because they specify the mechanism by which “political will” fails to appear: will is not simply absent; it is actively managed away through diplomatic caution and internal balancing.

He then states that Europeans too often turn against each other—leaders, parties, movements, communities—instead of standing together to stop Russia, which brings the same destruction to everyone. Again, the claim is not merely moral. It is a claim about the distribution of argumentative responsibilities. If Europe is internally polarized, then external adversaries face not a single will but a marketplace of vetoes and factions. The speech’s recurring demand for unity is therefore not a generic call for solidarity; it is a tactical diagnosis of how adversarial power exploits fragmentation.

The kaleidoscope image returns, and Europe is accused of remaining lost, trying to convince the U.S. president to change, while “he will not change.” Zelenskyy says Trump loves who he is, says he loves Europe, yet will not listen to “this kind of Europe.” The phrase “this kind of Europe” is ambiguous and thus strategically useful. It can refer to Europe’s fragmentation, its hesitation, its dependence, its preference for words over action. The speech does not fully specify, and that underspecification is part of its rhetorical force: it allows each listener to insert their own sense of what “this kind” means, while still accepting the indictment.

At this point the speech introduces a diagnosis that it calls “one of the biggest problems” and “not often talked about”: the “mindset.” Some leaders are “from Europe,” but not always “for Europe.” Europe feels more like geography, history, tradition, not a real political force, not a great power. This is the speech’s most explicit attempt at a political phenomenology: it treats Europe as an identity that remains cultural rather than political, descriptive rather than performative. To say Europe is “geography” is to say it is given; to say Europe is “political force” is to say it is made. The speech’s overarching thesis that “world order comes from action” is mirrored here: Europe exists culturally, yet fails to exist as will.

He then sketches the election-cycle logic: Europeans say they must stand strong, yet want someone else to tell them how long, preferably until the next election. Great power does not function that way, he says. Leaders defend European interests, yet hope someone else will do it. He then says some say Europe needs something to replace the old world order, but asks where are the leaders ready to act now on land, in air, at sea to build a new global order. “You can’t build the new world order out of words,” he says; “Only actions create real order.”

This is the event’s conceptual climax in miniature: the speech offers a theory of order as product of forceful enactment, and a critique of discourse that detaches itself from enactment. Importantly, this is not an anti-intellectual speech in the simple sense, because it is itself highly rhetorical and conceptually ambitious. Its claim is rather that discussion, when it becomes an alternative to decision, is a mode of self-exculpation. The line near the end, that “no intellectual discussions are capable of stopping wars,” should be read in that light: it is not a rejection of thought; it is a rejection of thought that refuses to bind itself to risk.

The “Board of Peace” segment then introduces another institutional layer: America has launched something called the “Board of Peace,” Ukraine was invited, Russia and Belarus were invited, yet the war has not stopped and there is not even a ceasefire. Zelenskyy says “you have seen who joined,” everyone had reasons, but Europe has not formed a united position on the American idea. Perhaps tonight when the European Council meets, they will decide something, but the documents were signed this morning. The point is speed again: America moves; Europe deliberates; deliberation arrives after signatures. Greenland appears again in parallel: tonight they might finally decide something on Greenland. He notes Mark Rutte spoke to Trump, thanks him for productiveness, says America is already changing its position but nobody knows exactly how. Things move faster than Europe. “How can Europe keep up?” he asks.

This section is methodologically significant because it makes the event itself into an example of the diagnosis. In the moderator’s framing, America leads diplomacy. In Zelenskyy’s report, America launches an initiative and signs documents before Europe has a united position. The event thereby becomes reflexive: the speech’s content mirrors the institutional reality of the forum and the geopolitical moment it references. Davos, as a venue, is implicitly the stage where Europe learns that it is late.

From here the speech offers a positive image of what Europe could be. Zelenskyy says Europe should not degrade itself to secondary roles, should not accept being a “salad of small and middle powers seasoned with enemies of Europe.” When united, Europe is “invincible.” Europe can and must be a global force: one that defines the future, helps regions, helps itself, defends a “European way of life” where people matter and nations matter. Europe must build a better world without war, yet for that it needs strength, togetherness, timeliness, and courage. The repetition of “act together and act in time” shows that temporality remains central: unity without speed is insufficient.

He then returns to the war-ending project. He reports meeting Trump “today,” teams working almost every day, documents aimed at ending the war nearly ready, Ukraine working with honesty and determination, Russia must become ready too, pressure must be strong enough, support must grow stronger. He thanks prior meetings with U.S. president for defense missiles, thanks Europeans for helping, says they spoke about protecting skies and hopes America continues to stand with Ukraine. Then he states Europe must be strong and Ukraine is ready to help with anything needed to guarantee peace and prevent destruction. He says Ukraine is ready to help others become stronger, ready to be part of a Europe that truly matters, a Europe of “real power.” He adds that today Ukraine needs that power to protect its independence, but Europe needs Ukraine’s independence too because tomorrow Europe may have to defend its way of life. When Ukraine is with Europe, no one will wipe their feet on Europe, and Europe will always have a way to act, and act in time.

This is a crucial transformation in the speech’s rhetoric. Earlier, Ukraine is the injured party and Europe is the negligent helper. Here, Ukraine becomes a capacity-enhancer for Europe, a provider of expertise and willingness, a participant in European greatness. The relationship is inverted: Europe is no longer simply the giver of aid; Europe is the beneficiary of Ukrainian inclusion. The speech thereby attempts to reposition Ukraine from periphery to constitutive element of European power. The line about no one wiping their feet on Europe is deliberately corporeal and humiliating; it aims to make dependence felt as shame, and inclusion of Ukraine felt as restoration of dignity.

The closing returns to Davos itself. Zelenskyy remarks it is one of last days of Davos, yet not last Davos, and says many believe things will work out on their own. He rejects reliance on “somehow” for real security. Then comes the explicit rejection of faith: “Faith is not enough,” faith in partner, in lucky turn of events. “No intellectual discussions are capable of stopping wars. We need action.” World order comes from action; courage to act; without action now there is no tomorrow. “Let’s end this groundhog day,” he says, and ends with thanks and a patriotic phrase, followed by extended applause and the moderator’s comment about standing ovation.

The applause sequence is not mere noise; it is part of the event’s compositional frame. The extended ovation is a collective affirmation in the very space the speech has indicted. That produces an internal friction the event does not resolve. If Europe is paralyzed, why this intense approval? The event thereby stages a familiar disjunction between symbolic affirmation and operative change. The ovation is a sign that the audience recognizes itself in the critique, or wishes to be seen as recognizing itself, yet the speech’s thesis is that recognition without action is precisely the pattern of recurrence. In that sense, the ovation risks becoming the next iteration of the Groundhog Day structure: catharsis replaces commitment.

Then the format shifts into Q&A. The moderator says it is good to have Zelenskyy back and asks how the meeting with Trump went, adding “honestly,” “of course in the interest of your country,” and then says “I would never question that.” This exchange, small as it is, reveals the careful management of legitimacy. The moderator anticipates that an “honest” account might conflict with public relations, and frames honesty as already aligned with national interest. Zelenskyy responds that it was in the interest of his country, says the meeting was good, thanks the president for finding time, and begins to describe his team’s extensive interaction with the American team, making a joke about wanting to ask Trump to give them American passports because they spend so much time with Americans. The joke matters because it relaxes the intensity and also repeats the dependence theme in a lighter register: Ukrainian diplomacy is shown as deeply enmeshed with U.S. counterparts.

Within the speech itself, the most important conceptual tensions can now be stated with care, as immanent tensions rather than external criticisms. First, the speech demands European autonomy while repeatedly affirming that security guarantees do not work without the United States. The tension is not accidental; it is the speech’s way of forcing Europe to recognize that dependence can coexist with co-responsibility. Europe is asked to become capable of action in a world where the U.S. remains indispensable. Second, the speech uses justice—tribunals, ICC avoidance, frozen assets—as a measure of seriousness, yet it also treats speed and decisiveness as supreme virtues. Justice, however, often requires procedure. The event presses Europe to discover a form of procedural speed that remains legitimate, which is precisely the kind of institutional invention that Europe, in the speech’s telling, has not yet achieved. Third, the speech frames European values as anthropological commitments to the value of persons, yet it repeatedly depicts Europe’s action as governed by mood-management, internal sensitivities, and election cycles. The implied conflict is between a value-constitution and a practice-constitution. Europe’s self-description as a value community is confronted with Europe’s empirical practice as a delay community.

A further tension concerns the speech’s use of examples. Greenland, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela, oil tankers, missile components: these are heterogeneous domains. The speech’s method is to treat them as commensurable evidence of a single European pathology. The pathology is not ignorance; the pathology is a structural inability to convert knowledge into action. Each example is chosen because Europe can plausibly be said to have knowledge and capacity, yet fails to act in time. The examples migrate in function over the course of the speech. Early on, they illustrate general paralysis. Later, they become warrants for specific prescriptions: confiscate oil, enforce sanctions, cut supply chains, build unified forces, create bases, establish tribunals, stop internal taboo-management. The migration is important because it shows how the speech attempts to transform moral complaint into policy logic. The speech wants its audience to feel that action is not merely demanded; it is logically entailed by the facts Europe already acknowledges.

The event also repeatedly stages definitional drift around “Europe.” Sometimes Europe is an institutional actor—the EU that freezes assets, the European Council that might decide tonight, the Europe that has not formed a position. Sometimes Europe is a cultural entity, geography and history. Sometimes Europe is a set of leaders, parties, movements. Sometimes Europe is NATO-Europe reliant on the U.S. Sometimes Europe is the “European way of life” where people and nations matter. The speech relies on this drift because it allows Zelenskyy to indict Europe’s political incapacity while simultaneously appealing to Europe’s cultural-moral self-image. The drift is not sloppiness; it is the speech’s rhetorical engine. It keeps the audience interpellated: if you evade responsibility by saying Europe is only a market or only a culture, the speech shifts Europe into the register where responsibility still attaches.

In terms of compositional strata, the speech appears partly prepared and partly performative. The repeated “next point” structure suggests prepared segmentation. Yet there are also sighs, throat-clearing, colloquial phrases, jokes, and moments of sharp idiom that indicate live address and affect. The moderator’s framing is clearly prepared, with formal phrases about sovereignty, democracy, rules-based order. The speech then disrupts that technocratic tone with the Groundhog Day metaphor and with sharper accusatory lines. The event thus contains two discursive regimes: institutional reassurance and wartime impatience. Their co-presence is one of the event’s central frictions. Davos wants order-talk; Zelenskyy wants consequence-talk. The speech is an attempt to force order-talk to become accountable to consequence-talk.

The rhetorical-argumentative form can be characterized as a sequence of accusations, questions, and conditional imperatives, threaded by a single normative principle: action is the producer of order. This principle is asserted multiple times in different registers: as a critique of holiday delays, as a critique of sanctions ineffectiveness, as a critique of tribunal non-materialization, as a critique of token deployments, as a critique of taboo speech. The repeated returns to “act now” are not mere emphasis; they are the method by which the speech attempts to re-educate Europe’s temporality. Europe is asked to move from reactive temporality to constitutive temporality: from waiting for problems to pass to making conditions that prevent problems.

The event’s paratext is not ornamental; it is one of the conditions under which the speech is made legible, circulated, and domesticated. There are at least three distinct paratextual layers that exert pressure on interpretation. First, the YouTube-title packaging (“Goes Brutal on Europe,” “Exposes Putin Fear,” “EU Can’t Act Without US”) gives the speech a pre-read as an affective rupture and a humiliation narrative. Second, the channel description frames the address as “one of his most brutal speeches,” enumerates charges—paralysis, fear, dependence. A critical description must therefore include, as part of the event’s compositional frame, the struggle between the speech’s own effort to organize itself as a system and the platform’s tendency to reorganize it into consumable fragments.

This struggle is already visible in the way the speech is segmented. The moderator’s ceremonial introduction is itself an intentional composition: it builds a crescendo of moral predicates (“sovereignty,” “democracy,” “rules-based order”) and then compresses diplomatic developments into a single line of progress, culminating in the “20-point peace plan.” That claim operates as a kind of narrative closure before the main speaker has even begun. It implies that the event’s meaning will be partially located in forward motion toward “just and lasting peace.” Zelenskyy’s first move, by contrast, is to deny forward motion at the level where Europe is concerned. The introduction’s teleology is thus countered by the speech’s phenomenology of stasis. The event’s internal architecture can be read as a collision between two time-images: the moderator’s image of diplomacy as cumulative progress and Zelenskyy’s image of European politics as cyclic repetition.

The “Groundhog Day” motif is not merely a flourish but a formal principle that organizes how Zelenskyy handles evidence, responsibility, and urgency. The motif does at least four different kinds of work across the speech. It establishes a criterion for evaluation: repetition across a year indicates failure. It authorizes impatience: if the same admonition must be repeated, then politeness toward the audience’s self-respect is no longer the primary norm. It compresses complexity: disparate crises can be treated as instances of the same repetitive form of life. And it prepares the ending: “Let’s end this groundhog day” functions not as an ornamental closure but as a proposal for a new temporality, a transition from recurrence to directed action.

What is distinctive is that the speech repeatedly treats temporality as a moral category. Delay is not described as an unfortunate side effect of democratic procedure; it is described as the active production of impunity. The Iran passage is exemplary: the speech does not only say Europe failed to help; it narrates the failure as a temporal sequence in which holidays, return to work, and the formation of position are temporally misaligned with violence. The conceptual claim is that time is not neutral; time is an input into political causality. A polity that cannot synchronize its decision-making with the tempo of violence becomes, in effect, a co-author of outcomes it later deplores.

The Greenland motif is similar but functions through a different temporal logic. Here the problem is not that violence accelerates during holidays but that Europe treats certain geopolitical developments as fashions that may fade. The speech frames European action as contingent on whether the United States “cools down.” This is a temporal dependence on another actor’s affective cycle. It depicts Europe not as an independent temporal agent but as a reactive mirror. The “what if it will not” question forces Europe to confront persistence: certain problems do not dissolve. In this sense, Greenland is used to represent the category of durable strategic challenges for which waiting is irrational.

One sees, across these cases, how Zelenskyy’s use of examples migrates from illustrative to justificatory roles, as the user request emphasizes. Early, the examples demonstrate repetition. Later, they become warrants for prescriptive claims: stop oil, confiscate assets, build forces, cut components. The migration is not arbitrary; it is an attempt to demonstrate that Europe’s inaction is not due to lack of feasible measures. Each example is chosen precisely because it is amenable to a plausible counter-action. In the speech’s internal economy, feasibility is not technical; feasibility is political.

This leads to one of the speech’s most important boundary-setting moves: the redefinition of what counts as “action.” For Zelenskyy, action is not limited to troop deployment. It includes legal-judicial institution building (tribunal “home” with staff and work). It includes financial-asset conversion (use frozen assets to defend). It includes economic interdiction (stop and confiscate oil). It includes sanctions enforcement in supply chains (cut off components). It includes rhetoric itself when rhetoric becomes “speaking honestly enough” to name options without diplomatic taboo. In this broad action-concept, the speech seeks to immunize itself against the common European reply that “we are doing something,” by insisting that many things that look like action are in fact symbolic or inert unless they produce consequences in adversary capability.

The “40 soldiers to Greenland” line clarifies this. Zelenskyy is not opposing deployment; he is opposing deployment that is not doctrinally credible and thus produces no deterrent effect. He presents a binary: establish bases that “protect the region,” or accept being not taken seriously. The underlying idea is that deterrence requires a public, interpretable signal backed by real force. A token deployment that cannot plausibly stop an adversary becomes an ambiguous signal that may invite testing. In that sense, the speech treats inadequate action as a special form of inaction: it is performative without being operative, and thus it contributes to the image of European weakness.

The repeated comparison to the United States is not merely admiration or complaint; it is a rhetorical device that reassigns Europe’s excuse-structure. When Zelenskyy says Trump can seize oil or arrest Maduro while Europe cannot bring Putin to trial, he is not arguing that Europe should imitate America’s specific legal or military means. He is arguing that Europe’s self-understanding as constrained is partly ideological. The United States becomes an external proof that some things can be done. Europe’s incapacity is thereby re-described as a choice among options, not as a fate. This is why the speech repeatedly returns to “political will.” The United States is used as a mirror that reflects Europe’s reluctance to risk, to offend, to escalate, to spend, to unite.

Yet the speech also uses the United States as an index of Europe’s dependence. “No security guarantees work without the US,” he says, and he frames leaders as trying to get closer to Trump. This creates a deliberate discomfort: Europe is asked to become a great power, but it is also shown as courting a U.S. president whose disposition is stable (“he will not change”) and whose listening depends on Europe being “a different kind” of Europe. The speech thus portrays dependence not as a purely material condition but as a condition of recognition. Europe wants to be heard by the U.S. president, but it is not heard because it is not yet a unitary agent. Dependence is therefore also discursive: the one who depends must speak in a form the decisive partner recognizes as force.

This discursive dimension is central to Zelenskyy’s critique of European internal quarrels. The Tomahawk and Taurus examples show a Europe that cannot speak certain words for fear of “spoiling the mood” or offending Greece or Turkey. These are not technical constraints; they are speech constraints. The suggestion is that Europe’s inability to act begins at the level of what Europe permits itself to say. If options cannot be named, they cannot be deliberated. If they cannot be deliberated, they cannot be enacted. The speech thus treats language as a precondition of agency, and diplomatic caution as a censorship regime internal to Europe.

This is a deeper claim than the more common complaint that Europe is bureaucratic. Bureaucracy can still act; it acts slowly but decisively when procedures exist. Zelenskyy’s critique is that Europe’s bureaucracy is not merely slow; it is blocked, vetoed, and internally fragmented. The speech repeatedly portrays Europe as a space where decisions are “blocked” at crucial moments (assets use, tribunal creation, sanctions strengthening), and where the adversary can exploit those blockages (“Putin managed this”). The term “managed” is important: it implies deliberate steering of European outcomes by Putin through means that need not be specified in detail. In the event’s logic, Europe’s internal structure is a manipulable machine. The adversary’s agency is realized not only at the front line but in the corridors of European governance.

The speech’s insistence on a special tribunal is therefore not only a justice demand. It is a demand for Europe to produce institutional embodiment that resists manipulation. A tribunal “home” with staff, work, and routine would represent a part of Europe that cannot be turned off by shifting moods. It would be a durable institution, a materialization of Europe’s commitment to accountability. Zelenskyy’s complaint is that Europe remains at the level of meetings and agreements. In a classical register, one could say the speech contrasts intention and actuality: Europe remains in the sphere of declared aims, not in the sphere where aims become objective institutions. The event treats this as a failure of ethical life at the institutional level, where norms must become embodied in stable practices.

The frozen assets episode performs a similar contrast. The EU freezing is praised; the subsequent blocking of use is condemned. The speech thereby distinguishes between the negative act of withholding and the positive act of reappropriating. Freezing is a kind of legal suspension. Using assets for defense or reconstruction would be a kind of political assertion. The speech implies that Europe is comfortable with suspension but not with assertion. This maps onto the broader theme that Europe “reacts” but does not “define the future.” The move from suspension to assertion is the move from reactive governance to constitutive governance.

The oil-tanker section then adds a maritime and geographic dimension to the argument. Russian oil flows “along European shores.” This is meant to make Europe’s inaction physically vivid. It is not a distant problem; it passes by Europe. The speech treats this proximity as a source of leverage that Europe refuses to use. The prescription to confiscate and sell oil “for Europe’s benefit” is morally and politically provocative. It proposes that Europe convert adversary resources into European security capacity. It also implies that Europe’s benefits and Ukraine’s defense are not separable: by stopping oil, Europe defends itself and Ukraine simultaneously. The speech thus tries to dissolve the charity framing of aid. It insists that European measures are self-defense, not altruism.

This self-defense framing is intensified when Zelenskyy says Russian oil funds the war and destabilizes Europe. Destabilization is not described in detail, but the term functions as an umbrella that includes economic effects, political influence operations, and security threats. The speech uses destabilization to bind Ukrainian war to European domestic order. Europe cannot treat the war as external because the war’s resources circulate within Europe’s domain.

The supply-chain section makes the same move with greater specificity. Zelenskyy says Russia’s missiles require components from Europe, the U.S., and Taiwan, not just China. This is a claim about complicity that is framed as a technical fact. The speech’s rhetorical strategy is to use technicality to make moral accusation harder to dismiss. If a European company supplies components, then Europe is not simply failing to act; Europe is actively enabling aggression. The speech then juxtaposes this with investments in stability around Taiwan. The implied inconsistency is that the world mobilizes to prevent one war while inadvertently feeding another. Europe’s silence is described as part of the problem: “Europe says almost nothing. America says nothing.” Inaction becomes not only the absence of sanctions but the absence of speech that would legitimate stronger enforcement.

The question “wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier” to cut off components or destroy factories is then another feasibility argument. It seeks to reframe the cost of supporting Ukraine’s defenses as avoidable if upstream measures were taken. The speech thereby treats certain forms of support as the expensive substitute for the politically difficult but strategically efficient measures that are avoided.

This returns us to the central wager: Europe’s failure is not ignorance or incapacity but unwillingness to accept the implications of its own commitments. Europe declares it supports Ukraine, values democracy, and wants rules-based order. Yet it avoids actions that would upset internal balances or provoke adversaries. The speech aims to make this avoidance visible as a contradiction. It is a dialectical strategy: force Europe to see that its declarations generate obligations it is not fulfilling.

The “mindset” section extends this dialectic to identity. Zelenskyy says some leaders are not always for Europe. Europe feels like geography and tradition rather than political force. This implies that Europe’s unity is not merely a matter of policy coordination but of self-conception. If Europe conceives itself as a cultural space, it will act like one: it will host forums, produce statements, celebrate diversity. If it conceives itself as political force, it will produce coercive institutions, collective defense capacity, and decisive sanctions. The speech calls for a transformation in self-conception, and thus in the practical reason that flows from it.

The “salad” metaphor—Europe as “a salad of small and middle powers seasoned with enemies of Europe”—is doing subtle work. A salad is a mixture without synthesis; it has ingredients, but they remain separate pieces. Seasoning is external; enemies are treated as additives that corrupt the mixture. The metaphor thus suggests that Europe’s plurality, without unity, is vulnerable to infiltration and manipulation. The kaleidoscope metaphor similarly suggests movement without direction, rearrangement without progress. These metaphors are part of the speech’s attempt to render fragmentation as a sensory image, not as an abstract concept.

The “great power” concept is the speech’s positive counter-image. Europe should be “a great power together.” Zelenskyy insists that great power does not operate on election-cycle temporality. Leaders who want someone else to tell them how long to stand strong are not acting as great-power leaders. Here the speech makes an implicit premise explicit: great-power agency requires endurance beyond domestic political cycles. If European democracies cannot produce durable commitments, their enemies can simply wait them out. This premise connects back to the holiday critique and to Groundhog Day. Recurrence is partly produced by election-cycle resets: each year, each summit, each cycle, the same discussions reoccur because commitments are not stabilized institutionally.

The “Board of Peace” episode exemplifies this with immediate relevance. America launches an initiative, documents are signed, Europe has not formed a position. The speed differential becomes not only embarrassing but structurally dangerous: Europe cannot influence an initiative if it forms its view after signatures. The speech thus treats European deliberation as a form of lost agency. Deliberation that arrives too late becomes irrelevant. In that sense, Europe’s internal procedures, which might be justified under normal conditions, become sources of strategic marginalization under crisis tempo.

Within the event’s economy, Mark Rutte’s call with Trump is introduced as an example of productive engagement. Yet it also underscores the dependence theme: America “already changing its position,” and “nobody knows exactly how.” Europe is again depicted as guessing and waiting. The phrase “things move faster than Europe” is both descriptive and normative. It implies that Europe must increase its tempo or accept subordination. The question “how can Europe keep up” is posed as if Europe were chasing, not leading. That is precisely the role Zelenskyy later rejects when he says Europe should not degrade itself to secondary roles.

The closing insists on courage and action, and explicitly demotes intellectual discussion. This demotion must be read in relation to the event’s venue. Davos is a premier site of “intellectual discussions” among elites. The speech’s line that such discussions cannot stop wars is thus a critique of the forum’s self-justification. It does not deny that discussions matter; it denies that discussions, absent embodied policy, have causal efficacy against aggression. The speech uses the forum’s own form against it: the forum becomes the symbol of talk that replaces action.

The Q&A begins with the moderator asking about the Trump meeting and explicitly asking for honesty “in the interest of your country.” This framing is itself a boundary-setting move: it identifies a potential conflict between truth and strategic messaging, then resolves it by defining honesty as aligned with national interest. Zelenskyy responds with gratitude and humor about passports for his team. Humor here serves as a technique to soften the discussion and to maintain rapport with the forum. It also functions as a subtle reminder that Ukrainian diplomacy is deeply embedded in American channels. This reinforces, rather than undermines, the speech’s claim that Europe cannot act without U.S. backing. The Q&A thus appears poised to pull the event toward the pragmatic details of U.S.-Ukraine negotiation, which could either discipline the speech’s broader European critique or amplify it by showing precisely how central America remains.

The moderator’s introduction offers a harmonizing frame of shared values and strategic cooperation, and pre-centers the U.S. as diplomatic lead. Zelenskyy’s speech accepts the U.S. centrality but treats it as a symptom of European incapacity, thereby turning the introduction’s reassurance into evidence of the problem. The speech then cycles through cases where Europe’s action is delayed, blocked, or symbolically insufficient. It introduces positive counter-images—united armed forces, tribunal embodiment, decisive sanctions, a great power Europe, coalition of action—then binds these counter-images to the urgency of time. The conclusion reasserts that action produces order, demotes discussion, and attempts to close the cycle of repetition. The applause reintroduces the risk of symbolic satisfaction. The Q&A begins to re-anchor the discourse in U.S.-centered negotiation, potentially reactivating the dependence structure the speech critiques.

The event therefore stabilizes its central problematics—Europe’s dependence on the U.S. versus Europe’s necessity to act—by keeping both poles in play and refusing a simplistic resolution. The speech does not tell Europe to eject the U.S.; it tells Europe to stop hiding behind the U.S. It does not deny that Trump matters; it asserts that Europe’s relation to Trump is itself a test of whether Europe is a political subject. The speech frames the test as one of courage and speed, rather than of abstract identity.