G7 leaders meet in Puglia

The leaders of the Group of Seven gathered from 13 to 15 June at Borgo Egnazia, a fortified resort in the town of Fasano, in the heel of Italy, in Puglia, under the presidency of Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister. It was the fiftieth summit of the group and the first time Italy had hosted it in six years. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, was invited and spent much of the talks at the table.

The headline outcome was agreed on the second day: the G7 formally committed to a fifty-billion-dollar loan to Ukraine, backed by the expected future profits from frozen Russian central-bank assets. The assets themselves, held in Europe and elsewhere, amount to more than two hundred and sixty billion dollars, and the loan was designed to lend against the income they are expected to generate rather than the capital itself, so that the funds could be raised quickly on international markets without touching the frozen principal. The announcement was meant as a signal of staying power for Kyiv, at a moment when American aid had been slow to arrive and the war on the ground had settled into a grinding standoff.

Ukraine was not the only subject. The leaders issued a long statement on the war in Gaza, where the humanitarian situation was worsening, and called for an immediate ceasefire and the release of the hostages. Migration was high on the agenda, reflecting the pressure of arrivals on the southern European coast, and the communique committed the group to working with countries of origin and transit and to disrupting the smuggling networks. Artificial intelligence was treated as a strategic risk and a strategic opportunity at once, with the leaders calling for international rules that would keep the technology safe without slowing its development, and for shared standards on critical minerals and on economic coercion.

The setting was deliberately chosen. Meloni had turned the summit into a showcase for her own region, with the leaders staying at a resort built around a nineteenth-century farmhouse among the olive trees, and the talks scheduled to leave room for evening walks. The optics mattered because the group was trying to project unity at a time when it was visibly under strain: Donald Trump, the former American president and a candidate in November’s election, had questioned the value of alliances, and the European members were talking publicly about strategic autonomy. This was also Joe Biden’s last G7 as president.

The final day was given over to Africa, where Meloni had invited the leaders of more than a dozen African countries to discuss investment, food security and migration, a nod to the fact that the G7’s own decisions were increasingly shaped by what happened outside its borders. The leaders also signed up to a joint statement on AI research and to a set of pledges on climate, though the most concrete money on the table remained the Ukraine loan. When the leaders left Puglia on 15 June, that loan was the one hard deliverable; everything else — the statements on Gaza, on AI, on migration — was language to be argued over again at the next meeting. The group had shown up, agreed on Ukraine, and gone home.