BRUSSELS — Kaja Kallas’ troubles started on her first day.
The EU’s top diplomat was on a trip to Kyiv when
she tweeted: “[T]he European Union wants Ukraine to win this war” against Russia.
Some EU officials said they felt uneasy that the head of the European External Action Service, less than a day into her job, felt at liberty to go beyond what they considered to be settled language more than two years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“She (Kallas) is still acting like a prime minister,” said one EU diplomat who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to discuss internal bloc dynamics.
The aforementioned diplomat and nine other EU diplomats and officials pointed to what they viewed as a series of missteps during Kallas’ first few months on the job, from floating heavy proposals without buy-in to taking liberties with foreign policy statements, they told POLITICO. (Kallas still has her defenders among the EU’s northern and eastern states, including Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. A second diplomat said: “Overall, we are very happy with her.”)
As Kallas put her stamp on the job, pressuring EU countries to give more military aid to Ukraine, several diplomats chafed at her leadership style, complaining of what they described as a lack of consultation on sensitive matters. In subsequent months those concerns have only grown, including regarding Kallas’ hawkishness on Russia, which has left her out of step with Spain and Italy, who do not share her assessment of Moscow as an imminent threat to the EU.
“If you listen to her it seems we are at war with Russia, which is not the EU line,” one EU official complained.
Haters gonna hate
As Kallas returned from the Munich Security Conference in February, she put together a proposal for EU countries to provide billions in urgent military aid for Ukraine after U.S. Vice President JD Vance dismissed Russia as a concern.
The Estonian politician reacted as a prime minister might — by circulating a 2-page document to rapidly compensate for a potential U.S. shortfall, asking the bloc’s 27 member countries to find at least 1.5 million rounds of artillery ammunition, among other requests.
The proposal landed on a Sunday evening, without warning, ahead of a foreign affairs gathering set to take place in the days ahead, and it ruffled feathers. Even more damning to some recipients was the way Kallas had structured her proposal: It required each country to make a contribution proportional to the size of their economies.
The rationale was that this would force larger EU countries such as France, which have contributed less per capita than Northern or Eastern European countries, to dig deep. To some, however, that felt like coercion. Criticism reached a fever pitch last week when Kallas agreed to downgrade the ambition of her plan to seek just €5 billion worth of artillery shells as a first step.
Two diplomats, from Eastern and Northern Europe, noted that Kallas had failed to obtain buy-in from major countries such as France before tabling her proposal. “This sort of came out of nowhere. The process could have been better managed to avoid taking people by surprise,” said one of them, adding in Kallas’ defense: “If she’d done the perfect process they would have hated it anyway.”
An EEAS official downplayed the criticisms, saying member countries had chosen Kallas because they wanted a wartime leader.
“They hired a head of state for a reason, not to moderate quietly and find the lowest common denominator but to push things forward,” the official said. “Many people argue we are in 1938 or 1939. It’s not the time to hide behind processes. European leaders keep calling for more Ukraine aid, ok cool, time for deeds not just words.”
‘Jury is still out’
It’s the bookend to a bumpy start for the former Estonian prime minister, who took over the EEAS, the EU’s diplomatic arm, at a time coinciding with a proposal to slash its
staffing and funding.
Hailing from a small country (at 1.4 million, Estonia’s population is smaller than that of Paris), as well as from a liberal party that fared poorly in recent Europe-wide elections, Kallas is an outsider in a EU now dominated by conservative leaders, and where national leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Chancellor-to-be Friedrich Merz are increasingly setting the pace on defense policy.
The failure of the Kallas plan came on the heels of a canceled rendezvous in late February with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who spiked the meeting in Washington, D.C. at the last minute.
A fifth EU diplomat and a former senior EU official both agreed that Kallas hadn’t properly set the groundwork for the meeting by offering a clear deliverable to the U.S. side.
“She went with her hands in her pockets,” said the former senior EU official — an assessment that Kallas’ spokesperson disputed, stating that the meeting had been confirmed and “well-prepared.”
Then came the infamous exchange by Vance and U.S. President Donald Trump in an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Amid the widespread shock at the vitriol aimed at Zelenskyy,
Kallas tweeted that “the free world needs a new leader” — a comment that may have matched the mood of indignation in many parts of Europe, but also irked countries adamant about maintaining a bridge to the Trump White House.
“Most countries don’t want to inflame things with the United States,” said a sixth diplomat. “Saying the free world needs a new leader just isn’t what most leaders wanted to put out there.”
It’s still early days for Kallas in her new post, some of the diplomats concede. And as Brussels has seen, a lot can happen in a short time.
“The jury is still out,” a senior EU diplomat added.
