In Odesa, a waiter at the Benedikt cafe has not followed the Greenland crisis closely, but he sees parallels between Donald Trump’s territorial ambitions and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “They’re crazy. The pair of them,” he said.
Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign policy committee, warned that the Greenland dispute distracts European allies from supporting Ukraine. “Any distraction among our European partners weakens the coalition supporting us. It weakens Nato, and it weakens transatlantic solidarity,” he said.
Merezhko also argued that Trump’s actions undermine the post-war rules-based order. “As an international lawyer, one of the key principles is that territorial integrity is sacrosanct. We support the territorial integrity of Denmark. And what I am afraid of is [that the Greenland issue plays into] Putin’s idea of dividing the world into spheres of influence.”
Leo Litra of the New Europe Center wrote that US actions “effectively legitimise aggressive territorial claims by stronger states against their neighbours” and “pose a direct threat to Ukraine’s defence in its war against Russia”.
Russian officials have seized on the crisis. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Trump’s move could “go down in history”, while foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed “Greenland isn’t a natural part of Denmark”. Russian bot networks have spread disinformation, including a fake video of President Zelenskyy backing Ukrainian troops for the Arctic.
President Zelenskyy told the World Economic Forum in Davos that Europe remains in “Greenland mode: maybe someone somewhere will do something”. Oleksii Striapko, an IT specialist, said: “As a Ukrainian who has been living in a state of war for four years now, I feel not so much Europe’s indifference as its war fatigue.”
