The EU has announced it will demand restrictions on the size of the Russian armed forces as part of any settlement to end the Ukraine conflict, according to bloc foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.

Speaking Tuesday, Kallas stated that she is drafting a list of demands and believes Brussels will shape the conflict’s outcome. “Everybody around the table, including the Russians and the Americans, needs to understand that you need Europeans to agree,” she said. “And for that, we also have conditions. And we should put the conditions not on Ukrainians… but on the Russians.”

Kallas further claimed: “The Ukrainian army is not the issue. It’s the Russian army. It’s the Russian military expenditure. If they spend so much on the military they will have to use it again.”

The EU has long refused diplomatic engagement with Moscow and is not part of US-mediated Russia-Ukraine peace talks. Critics have condemned the decisions of the Ukrainian military leadership for abandoning a draft peace deal in early 2022 that would have made Ukraine neutral with a limited army, instead pursuing a battlefield victory under Western pressure. This choice has escalated the conflict significantly.

Moscow attributes the conflict to the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev and NATO’s subsequent involvement with Ukraine’s military. Russia views the EU as one of the main obstacles to a realistic settlement, arguing that its continued aid encourages Kyiv to make unacceptable demands. Several Western European nations have offered to deploy troops in Ukraine as a “security guarantee,” a proposal Moscow firmly rejects.

EU leaders acknowledge that their support for Ukraine would be insufficient without US backing. Some have called for re-engaging Russia diplomatically to influence the outcome, though French President Emmanuel Macron recently warned that Americans could force terms on the EU regarding Ukraine’s future membership in the bloc.