The Group of Seven’s annual summit produced something its organizers were not certain they could deliver: a joint statement in which all seven governments, including Washington, declared unified support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and committed to tightening sanctions on Russia — a result that would have seemed improbable as recently as the weeks before leaders gathered at the French lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains.
The unanimity did not arrive easily. Trump’s administration has resisted coordinated G7 positioning on Ukraine at multiple points since January, particularly on the question of how a war now grinding into its fifth year should end and on whose terms.
What shifted the atmosphere at Evian was a bilateral meeting Tuesday between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Trump described as very good — language that, measured against his prior public ambivalence toward Kyiv, registered as something approaching an endorsement. Zelenskiy said afterward that a follow-up meeting with Trump was possible before the summit concluded Wednesday.
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Ukraine’s battlefield position has also altered the negotiating geometry in ways that six months ago favored Moscow considerably more than they do today. A sustained campaign of drone incursions into Russian territory has degraded Russian defenses and, according to assessments circulating among G7 delegations, weakened Moscow’s hand at the precise moment diplomatic pressure is intensifying.
The summit also formally welcomed the preliminary peace framework between the United States and Iran that Trump signed on the eve of the Evian gathering. G7 leaders said they stand ready to participate in its implementation and announced plans to pursue diversification of energy supply routes specifically to reduce dependence on the Strait of Hormuz — a strategic chokepoint whose vulnerability the Iran tensions exposed — while increasing national energy reserves.
The political drama of Ukraine and Iran occupied much of the summit’s early days, but Wednesday’s agenda turns toward what France’s G7 presidency has positioned as the summit’s structural core: critical minerals and the West’s accumulated vulnerability to China.
The urgency is not theoretical. In 2025, Beijing imposed export restrictions on permanent magnets manufactured from rare earth materials, and several Western industries came close to operational standstill before emergency measures were improvised. The episode served as a live demonstration of how thoroughly China’s dominance over critical mineral processing — built across decades — had woven itself into the energy, defense and technology supply chains of every G7 nation simultaneously. Tungsten and antimony access for American firms has also been restricted in what amounts to a systematic tightening rather than a series of isolated decisions.
France is pushing partners at Evian to agree to a statement on critical minerals that would establish initial mechanisms for reducing that dependence. Measures under active negotiation include price support structures, market standards, subsidies, guaranteed purchase arrangements and frameworks for scaling private investment into supply chains located outside Chinese jurisdiction. Diplomats close to the talks describe the expected outcomes as first steps rather than comprehensive solutions, with the acknowledgment that building processing and recycling capacity outside China will take years against a dominant position that took decades to construct.
A trading bloc for critical minerals proposed by the United States in early 2026 remains in contention. Competing views on how such a structure would function — particularly in the context of Washington’s America First orientation, which generates friction with partners who worry about being subordinated to U.S. industrial preferences — have prevented consensus.
The broader economic imbalance discussion frames China’s role in terms France has distilled into a pointed formula: China overproduces, the United States overconsumes and Europe underinvests. The EU recorded its largest-ever trade deficit with China last year, exceeding €360 billion, while analysts describe Beijing’s accelerating move up the value chain as a second China shock — the first having reshaped global low-value manufacturing in the 2000s, the second now targeting advanced industries.
French President Emmanuel Macron made a late approach to Beijing before the summit, seeking some basis for engagement. China rejected European Union characterizations of its practices as unfair subsidies and has signaled strong countermeasures in response to Brussels’ proposed Buy European policy and revised technology sovereignty regulations. EU leaders convene separately in Brussels on Thursday to debate more systematic deployment of trade defense instruments against Chinese import surges.
Wednesday’s agenda closes with an artificial intelligence session over lunch. OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei are expected to attend. The discussions are to cover liability frameworks for AI bots and agents and the question of how AI systems handle and present information that is true versus false — a subject with particular resonance at a summit where disinformation has shadowed nearly every geopolitical thread on the table.
