G7 Summit Opens in Évian Under Macron, Trump, Starmer

The 52nd Group of Seven summit opens in Évian-les-Bains, France on Monday, June 15, 2026, under French presidency, with the Ukraine war, the United States and Israel conflict with Iran, and the global trade architecture leading a three-day agenda that runs through Wednesday, June 17, the summit communique program confirms. President Emmanuel Macron, hosting for the second time after Biarritz in 2019, welcomes United States President Donald Trump for his sixth G7 appearance, United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, alongside European Council President Antonio Costa and the rotating European Commission president slot.

Beyond the core seven, Macron's invited-leader list signals the multilateral repositioning the French presidency has been building since the Kananaskis transition. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kenyan President William Ruto, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, and Syrian Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa head the invitation list. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is scheduled to address a Tuesday session on the Russia-Ukraine war, with air-defense support and tightened Russian-economy sanctions positioned as his core asks.

The Iran agenda track is the part of the summit the European Commission's communications team has been managing most carefully across the pre-summit briefings. The US-Iran fragile ceasefire architecture that has held since April second is the structural baseline the summit will be working from, and the Sunday weekend exchanges that produced the strongest pushback from President Trump's Fox News appearance the previous day have moved the topic from a scheduled agenda item into the operational center of the Monday and Tuesday closed-door bilateral cycles. Macron's office signaled at the pre-summit press briefing that France would press for a clearer European role in any post-ceasefire framework, a positioning the Council on Foreign Relations and other policy shops have been reading as the early opening salvo of the French presidency's diplomatic posture across 2026.

The Ukraine track moves into the second-day session that Zelensky's video address will anchor. The package the Ukrainian president is expected to propose includes a tightened-secondary-sanctions framework around Russian energy export windows, with specific reference to the recent flows to a small number of Mediterranean refining and re-export channels, plus a renewal of the air-defense supplement that was the primary outcome of the 2025 Kananaskis cycle. Whether the summit produces a binding G7 supply commitment or a softer political declaration will be the most-watched outcome of the Tuesday afternoon working session.

The trade-architecture track is the third major-item conversation the summit will produce, anchored by the post-Kananaskis US-UK trade agreement that Trump and Starmer formalized at the last summit. The Trump administration's revised tariff regime, which has carried into the 2026 G7 cycle as a more standard component of the US negotiating posture, is the operational background against which the summit will discuss a renewed multilateral trade communique. The Canadian delegation, which had spent the back half of 2025 negotiating a tariff-and-trade-architecture deal of its own with the United States, brings a separate bilateral track that will run alongside the multilateral conversation across Monday and Tuesday.

The expanded-invitation list is the part of the summit the European Council's policy directorate has been positioning as the most strategically meaningful long-term shift. The presence of Brazil, India, Kenya, and South Korea at the head table for the trade and global-economy sessions is the largest such expanded invitation the G7 has issued in the recent decade, and signals the French presidency's read of the multipolar diplomatic environment more aggressively than the prior US, German, or Japanese presidencies. The Syrian invitation, which represents the first G7 invitation to a sitting Syrian leader since the 2011 conflict cycle began, is the most editorially significant of the additions and carries the strongest backdrop in terms of intra-G7 internal debate.

What sits ahead, beyond the immediate three-day window, is the closing communique and the Wednesday afternoon press conference each of the G7 leaders will hold separately at the conclusion of the summit. Trump's office has not yet confirmed whether the president will stay through the full three days or, as in the 2025 Kananaskis cycle, depart early to manage the Iran calendar from Washington. Zelensky's session-day departure is set for late Tuesday. Macron's closing press conference will run as the host-leader summary at the conclusion of the working sessions Wednesday afternoon, and the joint communique, if signed by all seven, will be released simultaneous with that closing event.