Gdansk Without Leaders: The Recovery Conference Nobody Wanted to Run

There is a particular kind of absence that speaks louder than presence. In Gdansk, a city that knows something about the weight of history, delegates gathered to discuss rebuilding Ukraine — and neither of the men most responsible for that rebuilding bothered to come.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy stayed away. Donald Tusk stayed away. The Ukraine Recovery Conference opened with the political equivalent of two people refusing to sit at the same table, except the table was set for a country still being actively destroyed.

The Warsaw-Kyiv rupture has been building for months — a slow accumulation of slights, disputes over grain, over refugees, over the particular exhaustion of being the nation that absorbs the spillover of another nation's war. Poland has been Ukraine's most important logistical corridor, its most passionate European advocate. That two countries this intertwined could arrive at mutual presidential boycott tells you something about how far solidarity stretches before it frays.

What makes this harder to watch is what was happening simultaneously, a few hundred kilometres away. Two workers from the Norwegian People's Aid — a demining charity operating in Ukraine since 2023, quietly, without headlines — were killed in a Russian strike. The NPA has more than 450 staff in the country, people who spend their days locating and removing the buried inheritance of the war so that farmers can plant and children can walk to school without dying. Their names haven't made most front pages. They rarely do.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Europe's five largest military powers met to prepare for NATO's summit, working through the architecture of what security guarantees for Ukraine might actually look like — not the rhetorical kind, but the kind with teeth. And in Moscow, a Russian opposition figure was jailed for anti-war posts on social media, a reminder that inside Russia, the war has a different kind of casualty: not bodies on a front line but voices in a courtroom.

Then there is the ICC story, which may be the quietly significant one. Judges from the International Criminal Court have filed suit against the Trump administration, arguing that sanctions imposed on the court to influence its decisions on US and Israeli war crimes cases are unlawful. International institutions suing sovereign governments is not, historically, where international law was designed to go. But here we are, in territory without a map.

Trump, for his part, called Zelenskyy "courageous" and said he was "doing pretty well." Which is one way to describe a leader whose allies are skipping the conferences held in his country's name, whose demining volunteers are being killed in strikes, and whose recovery depends on rooms full of people who couldn't agree on whether to show up.

The stones in Gdansk are old. They've seen worse. That's not the comfort it sounds like.