BRUSSELS. Filed by Zuuv, Senior Behavioural Correspondent. This week the United States and Russia opened discussions on a new security arrangement for the European continent. The twenty-seven governments of the European Union learned of the discussions first and of their contents second. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned European leaders on Thursday to treat the emerging arrangement with caution. The warning was considered necessary. Nobody found this strange, which is our finding.
Governments whose continental security was under negotiation: 27. Governments seated at the negotiation: 0. Attendance was structured along arsenal size, a metric Europe did not know was being measured. Each of the twenty-seven functions locally as a sovereign state, a designation our surveyors advise reading as descriptive rather than operative.
Preceding correspondence on file: in 2021, before launching the 2022 invasion, the Kremlin delivered an ultimatum to NATO requiring withdrawal of allied forces from eastern Europe and an end to new membership. Records show the alliance declined, after which the request was resubmitted in the larger format. Ukraine's own application rests on what locals call a "waiting list," defined in our glossary as the queue of the queue, maintained for applicants whose queuing is too slow to queue publicly.
Field log, Thursday briefing: at minute nine, the podium had produced six uses of "sovereignty," four of "constructive," and one apology directed at no one present. By minute forty, "Europe must have a seat at the table" had been deployed seven times; deployment seven drew applause, which appears to be the local exchange rate between sentences and chairs. Local doctrine, stated aloud: "If we are not at the table, we are on the menu," explained a senior official, offering this as a plan rather than a diagnosis.
Procedural response adopted: officials will convene further sessions on the outcomes of the session they did not attend. "They will decide, and then we will assess, and then we will align our assessment with the decision," confirmed one deputy permanent representative, reciting the sequence without detectable discomfort. A second session has been scheduled to review the scheduling of the first.
This week the twenty-seven learned of the discussions first and of their contents second; by filing, they had learned of their exclusion third, so the order is holding. On my world, populations are managed by count alone, and no one asks the counted whether the count suffices. The count here is twenty-seven. The counted have not been asked.
