The Kremlin reviles her, Fico wants her sacked, Paris wants her clipped. Just so. The EU needs a foreign policy chief who is hard on Russia.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, used a Telegram post in early December to lump Kaja Kallas with Ursula von der Leyen among the “half-witted old biddies” he blamed for prolonging the war in Ukraine, with a cruder epithet held back for Kallas alone. Medvedev, a former Russian president, hands out such abuse freely. He does not usually aim it at the European Union’s foreign-policy chief by name. Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister who took the post in December 2024, has spent 18 months gathering enemies of just this sort, and the collection is worth a look before anyone decides she has failed.
Of EU prime ministers and heads of state, Robert Fico is arguably the most vocal opponent of Kallas. In January the Slovak prime minister told TA-3, a domestic broadcaster, that “we must replace Ms Kallas”, whom he accused of leaving Europe a bystander in world affairs. Fico, who stopped Slovak military aid to Ukraine last year, holds that trying to weaken Russia through war has simply not worked. His ally Viktor Orbán, erstwhile Hungarian prime minister, was equally anti-Kallas. When Orbán’s government blocked a joint statement by all 27 member states in January, Kallas pushed it out in the name of 26 and routed around Budapest’s veto; in March she dared him again by pressing to use Russia’s immobilised assets to fund Ukraine. Orbán has since lost his job, Kallas remains in post.
An informal French note, reported on June 11 by Reuters and the Financial Times, set out three ways to overhaul Kallas’s role, two of which would strip powers from the High Representative and pass them to the Commission or to national capitals. French officials played the paper down within days as merely “exploratory”. The retreat came late. A senior diplomat, speaking anonymously to Euronews, allowed that the complaint had merit, calling her “not very good at building alliances” in the Council, where the bloc’s foreign policy is actually decided. She had given them material: in March 2025 she tabled a 40 billion euros plan for Ukraine without squaring it with capitals first, and watched it flounder at a summit.
Kallas has not gone out of her way to be liked. In May she ruled out any pose of neutrality, saying the EU would “never be a neutral mediator” between Ukraine and Russia. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry’s spokeswoman, pounced within days, casting the remark as proof that Brussels had picked a side. Kallas had said much the same in February, telling Euronews that the Kremlin had sent nobody serious to the table.
The negotiating table
Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have spent the spring testing the very kind of direct contact with Moscow that Kallas wants to head off, working alongside Britain to keep a negotiating track open. Kallas tried to shut the idea down and got nowhere. The disagreement is real, and it sits at the centre of the case for her. A chief diplomat whose first instinct is to deny Russia a cheap settlement suits this moment better than one who would meet the Kremlin halfway. Few of her critics say so outright, but a softer line is what most of them are after.
The diplomats who complain about Kallas tend to concede, in the next breath, that her job is close to impossible. Foreign policy at EU level runs on unanimity, so a single government can sink a common position, and the High Representative answers to the Commission and to 27 capitals at once. One diplomat said that every holder of the post had failed and every successor would too. Those are faults of the machinery which would likely defeat anyone. Poland, the Baltic states and the Nordic countries back her often enough to make the point.
The Russian interior ministry had placed Kallas on a criminal wanted list back in February 2024, when she still ran Estonia, citing her removal of Soviet war memorials. She called it a scare tactic and refused, in her own words, to be silenced. The list of those who would now like her gone has only lengthened, taking in Medvedev, Fico, and Zakharova, with a less vocal set of Western diplomats who favour a gentler approach. It is not a list the EU should rush to please.
Photo: Dreamstime.