Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.

Cast your mind back to last year, when European leaders scrambled back and forth across the Atlantic, seeking to patch up tattered relations between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After the Oval Office brawl where a scolded Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump and his vice president before being ejected from the White House, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron led the effort to engineer a call between the pair, during which the Ukrainian president expressed regret about the meeting — but fell short of apologizing.

Likewise, after Trump’s August summit in Alaska with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Starmer and his top security adviser Jonathan Powell worked feverishly alongside other European leaders to rescue the broken relationship between Kyiv and Washington. They even came up with a ceasefire plan and got U.S. buy-in. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also did some heavy lifting.

But this time, after Trump unveiled a controversial diesel deal with Russia and called — once again — for Zelenskyy to step down, the European reaction has been less febrile. Of course, they have offered Kyiv strong rhetorical support and unveiled more Russia sanctions, but there has been no frantic, panicky outreach effort to Trump to mediate a speedy repair.

Why not?

Because the Trump shock factor is wearing off, hazards Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “The primary answer is that they have got used to him,” he told POLITICO. “They have all had an immunity shot, and they don’t feel as scared as they did last year.”

“Another reason is they’re drowning in their own problems,” he added. “And I think that first they feel they have to try to figure out how what Trump is doing will impact them — how big their bill will become as a result.”

European leaders are not scrambling like they did last year because Trump is “losing his leverage,” said Lia Quartapelle, an Italian lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party who is vice chair of the parliament’s Foreign and European Affairs Committee. “We realize he cannot be trusted and we are on our own,” so there’s little point lobbying him.

According to the Financial Times, EU officials plan to urge Zelenskyy to tone down his increasingly sharp remarks about Trump, fearing they are only inflaming the situation. Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, is positioning himself as someone who can “lay the ground” for a reconciliation, he explained to the House of Commons Wednesday. 

Nonetheless, the calmer reaction to Trump’s maneuvers stands out, acknowledges Daniel Fried, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs under U.S. President George W. Bush.

“The Europeans seem to have taken Trump’s measure,” Fried told POLITICO. “They want to avoid the worst. They want to mitigate the damage over the next two years while Trump is in office. They do work with people in the Trump administration with whom they can work. And there are such people.” 

Speaking from Warsaw, fresh from attending a recent security conference in the Polish capital, he said the Europeans understand now that much of what Trump does is performative and has a short life span — like the Russian diesel deal, which has a shelf life of two or three days, he said. “I’m not sure it’s going anywhere as it is utterly impractical and legally questionable, and it isn’t clear the Russians actually can supply the diesel,” he said. In other words, why get worked up about it?

Fried said in his conversations with European leaders and officials, he has detected increasing exasperation with the overall inconsistency of the American position: “Trump wants Europe to do more militarily, but it must buy American,” he said. “But we can’t sell to the Europeans because of our needs, so they will have to wait even though they can’t build it themselves. Nonetheless, they have to carry the load in Ukraine without us. That’s utterly inconsistent, and they are exasperated by it.” 

And they’re just tired of having Trump jerk them around, Fried added. “One thing they are trying to avoid is having Trump snap his fingers and they come flying. Because then it looks like they are at Trump’s beck and call and are his supplicants, and they don’t want to do that. Besides, if they fly out and talk him into something, how long will what he agreed to last?”  

Of course, the Europeans can also console themselves with the high chance of Trump reversing himself. “There is a pattern,” said Kuleba. “He launches a cavalry attack … and then retreats. That’s what we saw in February last year. That’s what we saw in November 2025. And that’s what we will see this time too.”

KYIV — Russia’s bid for reacceptance in world sports is gaining momentum ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. And nowhere has that been more visible than in President Vladimir Putin’s favorite event: judo. 

The martial art is a notable arena for Moscow’s return to international sport. Putin has long-standing ties to judo, and the sport’s governing body has become a leading force in decisions about Russian athletes’ participation.

Austrian-Romanian executive Marius Vizer is the entrepreneur who has helped transform his sport into a global commercial product since he began leading the International Judo Federation in 2007. But to his detractors, he’s a sports official who built a powerful network connecting Putin, Russia’s elites and global business interests, while maintaining the image of a neutral administrator.

“It’s clear that, considering how Vizer promoted the Russians and kept saying they were ‘good for us,’ [he has] definitely interests and connections in Russia. Russia’s ideas are everywhere,” the Ukrainian Judo Federation’s head coach Vitalii Dubrova said in an interview.

The International Judo Federation did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment on Vizer’s ties to Russia. The IJF also did not make Vizer available to reply to requests for comment.

While the IJF offered solidarity funding for Ukrainian judo in 2022 and instituted background checks on Russian and Belarusian athletes in 2023, in November 2025 it became the first major sports organization to fully reinstate Russian athletes — allowing them to compete under their national flag for the first time since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.

It was part of Moscow’s use of sports as a route back onto the global stage, from comebacks in major tournaments to broader Olympic rehabilitation — and a potential return at the 2028 Games, tacitly backed by Kirsty Coventry, president of the International Olympic Committee.

That has triggered alarm in Brussels, where top EU foreign policy officials are currently circulating ideas — from sanctioning athletes to cutting EU funds for sports federations that welcome Russia back — in a bid to slam the door on Russian reintegration, according to a European External Action Service document, dated Sept. 16 and seen by POLITICO.

While the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine continues unabated, Russia has nonetheless managed to retain influence at the top of international sports federations, including in chess, fencing and boxing. Moscow has found platforms to advance its soft-power agenda that have rankled Kyiv and European officials, who described how sport has “increasingly become a tool of political instrumentalisation by Russia and Belarus,” in the EEAS memo.

Vizer’s IJF, for its part, decried banning Russian athletes from sport, even as Putin was suspended as the honorary president of the organization days after the Kremlin’s tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine. 

“Russia uses propaganda to promote the idea that sport is apolitical, while money and influence help it regain its place in international sport,” Dubrova said.

Putin’s judo brotherhood

A mutually beneficial relationship between the Russian elite and international judo long predates the invasion of Ukraine. Under Putin, himself a judoka, it became a social network and loyalty system linking top political and business figures in Russian society.

Some of Putin’s closest allies are old friends from Leningrad’s judo circles in the 1960s–80s, forming what one analyst called a “judo brotherhood” or “judocracy” inside Russia, in an essay for Foreign Policy magazine in 2014.

The judocracy’s influence spread to the top of the sport globally. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood training partners, built construction and infrastructure empires in Russia through major state contracts, including the Crimean Bridge, which Ukraine views as an illegal attempt to connect mainland Russia with the occupied Black Sea peninsula. 

In 1998, Arkady Rotenberg took over the Yavara-Neva judo club in St. Petersburg, founded at Putin’s behest when he headed the country’s Federal Security Service. The Russian leader remains its honorary president, while Arkady Rotenberg served on the IJF executive committee from 2013 to 2022.

Vizer became president of the Romanian Judo Federation in 1995, led the European Judo Union from 2000 to 2007 and has headed the IJF since 2007. “Of course, [Vizer and the Rotenbergs] know each other,” former Georgian-Ukrainian judoka Georgii Zantaraia, now chair of the athletes’ commission of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, told POLITICO. “Putin was the honorary president of the International Judo Federation … [Vizer] was part of this structure.” 

The influence of Vizer as a sports powerbroker became clear in 2019, when world champion Saeid Mollaei said Iranian officials had pressured him to withdraw from the World Championships to avoid facing Israeli judoka Sagi Muki. The IJF suspended Iran and helped Mollaei continue his career abroad after he fled the country.

The spotlight then fell on Vizer’s ties to Putin, who appeared alongside him in Budapest that year. The Russian president held an informal meeting over tea with Vizer and IJF honorary Vice President Sándor Csányi — a symbolic public display of the Russian president’s privileged place within Vizer’s international judo network, reinforcing perceptions of his role as an important political ally.

The EU response

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion started, Vizer has echoed Russian officials and the state-backed Roscongress Foundation in arguing that sport should remain separate from politics, a stance that critics view as tacit backing for Russian aggression. 

Though many Russian Olympic athletes are also members of the armed forces, the judo chief has also insisted through his organization that athletes should not be held responsible for governmental actions.

“As sporting events and sport itself promote peace and solidarity worldwide, we consider that those athletes who participate in international sporting events are promoting peace and international solidarity,” the IJF said in early March 2022, while Russian forces closed in on Kyiv. “On this basis, the global decision to sanction all Russian athletes, regardless of the different opinions many have expressed, is not considered to be justified. We cannot condemn the athletes for what is happening.”

Four-and-a-half years on, representatives for Ukrainian athletes argue that restoring Russian competitors and national symbols normalizes Moscow’s ongoing aggression. “The flag came back, and that is what is important for Russia,” said Dubrova.

Ukrainian Sports Minister Matvii Bidnyi told POLITICO in July that the IOC is “effectively functioning as a pressure release valve” for Russia.

“It is up to each International Federation (IF) as the sole authority for its international competitions, outside of the Olympic Games, to decide on this question [restoring Russian athletes’ participation under the Russian flag, emblem and anthem]. For more, we kindly refer you to the IJF,” the IOC said in comments.

The IOC did not address the question about whether it had ever investigated potential Russian political or financial influence on decision-making within the IJF.

The IOC’s deferred decision on flags, anthems and team colors until an unspecified, later moment, “leaves scope for coordinated EU action to prevent the normalisation and political instrumentalisation of sport while the war of aggression continues,” EU officials noted in the Sept. 16 document.

The EU could press sports federations to keep Russian flags, anthems and officials out of competitions, they wrote, and withhold EU grants from bodies that let Moscow’s teams compete under national colors.

A more striking proposal targets the money around major events: EU countries could review where TV-rights revenue flows and use coordinated pressure to deter broadcasters and sponsors from backing competitions that give Russia a platform, the officials wrote.

The options also include visa restrictions for athletes competing under national colors and efforts to bring “like-minded” countries such as Britain, Norway and Switzerland into a wider coalition against Russian reintegration.

The Trump administration pressured diplomatic officials from the EU, Canada and Lithuania to pull out of an international conference on disinformation after organizers announced panels warning of the threat posed by American government officials and the country’s influence broadly, according to excerpts of a State Department cable seen by POLITICO.

The conference, titled #Disinfo2026, included sessions that described the U.S. as a “foreign information manipulation and interference” actor, or “FIMI,” which bothered the Trump administration, according to the cable. The conference is being held Wednesday and Thursday in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.

The State Department asked American embassies in several European countries and the EU to express Washington’s concerns and “assess” whether the governments involved in the conference agree with the U.S. being characterized as a FIMI actor, according to the cable.

FIMI is an EU term used to describe activities that try to distort public information, such as spreading disinformation online, usually by foreign actors such as Russia. The conference conflates the U.S. with “foreign adversaries like Russia and China,” which is a “false equivalence” that “obscures the scale and nature of Russian and Chinese interference in our democracies,” the cable states.

The demarche request appears to be an unusual administration effort to use allied government pressure to silence criticism from European citizens and Americans abroad (three U.S. citizens appeared on one of the panels that prompted the cable). It also marks an acceleration of the Trump administration’s years-long pressure campaign on the continent, which includes U.S. criticism of perceived EU censorship.

The recipients of the cable included U.S. embassies in France, Norway, Romania and Poland. The embassies each were told to tell their hosts — verbally, not in writing — that the U.S. was unhappy with the panels on American disinformation, according to the cable and a U.S. official, who, like others, was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation.

One of those panels, titled “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back” featured two American researchers and a former CIA official and looked at how the U.S. had become a disinformation threat to Europe. Another, titled “Under attack: How the counter-disinformation community is dealing with US government pressure,” asked legal experts to weigh in on the threat of U.S. government travel bans against European figures.

The State Department asked some of those countries — but not all — to reconsider participating in the event, said the U.S. official familiar with the cable, which came from the secretary of State’s office.

Officials from Norway, Romania and Poland still appear on the conference agenda. Spokespeople for the ministries of foreign affairs in Norway, Romania and Poland did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. officials also contacted France’s Foreign Ministry, but it did not withdraw from the conference.

The Trump administration and its allies have repeatedly tried to pressure EU allies to align with Washington’s standards of free speech, which some in Europe consider to be too broadly defined. These efforts have included public criticism, closed-door lobbying against EU laws and visa restrictions for Europeans.

Domestically, the administration has dismantled U.S. government organizations that fight disinformation, including at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans have also taken issue with some European laws that force social media platforms to be more active in combating false information online, such as laws requiring age verification for potentially harmful content, which some have said amount to censorship.

As of Monday, Canada and Lithuania asked organizers to remove their ministry logos from conference materials, according to a conference participant, and the European External Action Service followed on Tuesday. European news site Rapporteur first reported on the removal of the foreign ministry logos.

“To me, I see a very strange reaction from the State Department to a conference of researchers using our First Amendment free speech rights to talk about how to stop lying and manipulation that undermines democracy and hurts our families and hurts our children,” said Adam Fivenson, who works for the Center for Security, Innovation and New Technology at American University and was on one of the panels the Trump administration took issue with. This panel still proceeded as scheduled.

The cable also notes that top officials in the State Department’s global public diplomacy section reached out directly to Canadian officials to express frustrations with Ottawa’s participation in the conference. This part of the State Department, led by Sarah Rogers, handles the public-facing aspects of diplomacy that are aimed at building support for U.S. goals among foreign populations.

Asked for comment, the State Department said in a statement: “While we are unable to comment on the details of diplomatic conversations, it should not be a surprise that countries would disaffiliate from this conference upon learning that it labeled the U.S. a ‘FIMI threat.’ Labeling the United States a ‘FIMI threat’ — a term normally reserved for describing influence operations of adversaries — undermines shared goals and should alarm those involved.”

After speaking with U.S. officials, Canada and Lithuania pulled their support from the conference, meaning they don’t appear on panels or in conference materials. The EU’s External Action Service, its diplomatic arm, was also removed from official programming.

Images reviewed by POLITICO show conference banners with the logos of all Canadian, Lithuanian, and EU diplomatic services covered. France remains the sole “main supporter.”

Spokespeople for the EEAS and Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry both said they withdrew because some of the conference programming didn’t align with their official positions, though they did not specify what those positions are.

The cable draws a clearer line between U.S. engagement with Lithuania and Canada and their decision to pull public support for the conference. After speaking to the local U.S. embassy, “Lithuania’s Foreign Minister [Kęstutis] Budrys stated the U.S.-focused sessions did not represent the views of the Lithuanian government and committed that no one from Lithuania MFA would participate,” the cable reads.