‘We expected her to be, well, more diplomatic’
Kaja Kallas took office as the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs only a few months ago. Estonia’s former prime minister, who believes ‘evil lives on in Russia’, has had quite a first year.
Forceful: Kaja Kallas after the 29th GCC-EU joint council and ministerial meeting, Kuwait City, 6 October 2025
AFP · Getty
The European Union, sidelined in negotiations over Ukraine, has been left to foot the bill for the US arms industry’s shipments to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Its influence on the war in Gaza is close to zero. The EU’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has shown far less zeal in pressing Berlin and Rome to sanction Israel than in urging Europeans to send weapons to Ukraine: 19 rounds of sanctions imposed on Russia, and none against Israel. And, from Washington to Beijing and New Delhi, Kallas has only reinforced the impression of a Europe that compensates for its irrelevance by preaching sermons.
Kallas’s rabid Russophobia – a political advantage in her native Estonia – projects such a narrow view of European foreign policy that in early 2025 the 27 member states felt compelled to write to remind her that she needed to show some interest in Africa (Le Monde, 3 April 2025). In March, she tried and failed to push through yet another aid package for Ukraine, this time worth €20-40bn.
In fairness, coordinating a union whose interests diverge as much as those of Estonia and Portugal demands balance, humility and patience. But it was precisely Kallas’s impulsiveness and anti-Russian fervour that got her the job in the first place, as a deliberate provocation to Moscow. ‘Her days begin and end with Russia,’ a Brussels diplomat said off the record. Another added, ‘We expected her to be, well, more diplomatic’.
Hiring a warrior rather than an ambassador was the European Council’s aim from the start. Thanks to Kallas, the EU can wheel out a grand narrative of the cold war reborn, but this time with Europe as protagonist, not pawn, and Kyiv in the role of West Berlin. Kallas can play Dr Strangelove opposite commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s JFK.
Kallas comes with the perfect backstory: she was born in 1977 in Soviet Estonia, and her mother was deported to Siberia in 1949, aged six months, along with her grandmother. In 1988 her father (…)
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