Because the news broke on a Friday night in Europe, many U.K. officials had to start working at home. “There was a lot of WhatsApp traffic,” said the British official quoted above. “It was people at home trying to have a night off, but then instantly realizing — fuck me, this is really bad.”
One French minister, whose portfolio is not directly impacted, was in his constituency in a remote part of France when a friend pulled him aside to flag what just happened. “I went back home and got stuck in front of my TV until 1 a.m.,” he said.
Macron, on a visit to Portugal, was in the middle of a TV interview when wire reports started to drop. After the interview, he immediately watched the footage and, as he was shuffled to his plane to get back to Paris, picked up the phone to call Zelenskyy from the aircraft.
Merz was sent the footage by a member of his staff as he made his way home to the Sauerland, a three-hour car ride from Hamburg, German magazine Stern reported. Merz immediately made several calls from the car, and wrote a solidarity post for Zelenskyy on X.
Three days later, Merz informed the party leadership of his CDU during a video conference about one of the biggest U-turns in recent German history: the planned relaxation of the debt brake for defense spending and a €500 billion special fund to stimulate the economy.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy was blindsided too. He landed at Heathrow Airport, upbeat after a meeting with his U.S. counterpart Marco Rubio that aides felt had gone well. His team spent much of the day dealing with the news that Dodds, the aid minister in his department, had resigned. But this frenzy was soon forgotten after Zelenskyy’s Oval Office trip.