If Donald Trump’s earlier characterization of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and his repeated refusal to offer any disobliging description of Vladimir Putin had left any mystery as to where his affinity lies, he eliminated all doubt within 10 minutes on Friday at the tail end of a supposed diplomatic breakthrough in U.S.-Ukrainian relations. Joining with his vice president, JD Vance, in a tag-team humiliation of the Ukrainian president, Trump openly expressed his kinship with Putin as a fellow victim in “a phony witch hunt,” presumably referring to the well-established Russian intelligence and influence campaign to get Trump elected the first time. The American president further blamed Zelenskyy’s “tremendous hatred” of Putin as the main obstacle to peace rather than Russia’s continued bombardment or occupation of Ukrainian cities. Ukraine’s future as a sovereign country, Trump indicated, was not a matter of strategic imperative or American interest or principle, but rather a favor only Trump could bestow upon it if Zelenskyy played his “cards” right. (Casino metaphors are never far from Trump’s lips.)
For Europeans watching, one thing became clear. Washington now regards Kyiv as an adversary from which concessions must be wrung and terms of conditional surrender imposed, while it sees Moscow as an ally-in-the-making and the more justifiably aggrieved party in the war of conquest Moscow started three years ago.
Reaction in Europe was swift and virtually unanimous, with leaders rushing to social media to offer their unqualified support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy. Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister and new EU foreign minister, offered the starkest rebuke of the United States and Trump personally: “Today it became clear,” she posted on X, “that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”
For weeks, the continent has been dreading this eventuality — or inevitability — as an ailing patient might dread a terminal prognosis. For the first time in eight decades, Europe looks to be on its own. Not only is the inviolability of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense in dispute, if not America’s continued participation in the alliance, but safeguarding Ukraine’s existence will almost certainly have to depend on European security guarantees and ongoing security assistance without the U.S., whose flow of materiel to Ukraine, according to The New York Times, has already slowed to a “trickle.”
The U.K., America’s closest ally, is understandably trying to defer or forestall the American realignment toward Russia, the speed and intensity of which was recently noted with glee by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov. Building on his own slightly more successful meeting with Trump last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer attempted to bring both sides together, acting, in his words, as a “bridge” between Washington and Kyiv. He reportedly has advised Zelenskyy to repair his relationship with Trump and seek a redo of signing an agreement to give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s mineral and rare earth deposits as back payment for previously donated American weapons and ammunition (but without any concrete security guarantees going forward). Given the British public’s overwhelming support for Ukraine, Zelenskyy was on far happier footing in London, sweeping into No. 10 Downing St. to a chorus of cheers and demonstrators waving Ukrainian flags. More tangibly, London hosted a meeting of 14 other European leaders the following day, originally intended as a briefing about Starmer’s visit with Trump, but hastily turned into a crisis gathering to solidify military and financial support for Ukraine.
A “coalition of the willing” is said to be in the making, meant to craft a viable peace plan for the war, for which Europe hopes to gain Trump’s approval. Details are sketchy at best, but reporting suggests the first step would be a month-long partial “truce” to test whether a more lasting ceasefire, possibly backed by British and French troops in Ukraine, might be possible.
Despite the British, French and Italian encouragement to make nice with Trump, Zelenskyy, above all, seems to glimpse the geopolitical state of play far better than his patrons. Emerging from his conclave at Lancaster House, Zelenskyy posted to X in English: “[W]e see clear support from Europe. Even more unity, even more willingness to cooperate. … Of course, we understand the importance of America, and we are grateful for all the support we’ve received from the United States.” This was followed by expressions of gratitude for American support of the sort that Vance had claimed were lacking from the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office. Realignment has already led to reprioritization.
The larger question lingering in the background of these developments is whether Europe can take it from here, absent America.
According to Serhii Kuzan, the chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, “Currently, Ukraine provides about 40% of its own military needs, and approximately 30% is provided by Europe and another 30% by the United States.” Between 2023 and 2024 alone, Ukrainian production of artillery systems increased threefold, Kuzan noted, with five times the number of armored personnel carriers manufactured, twice the number of anti-tank weapons and 2.5 times the amount of ammunition. For all that, Kyiv is still underperforming due to a lack of capital, something Kuzan anticipates foreign direct investment in the Ukrainian defense industry — projected to reach just over $1.5 billion in 2025 — will go some way toward correcting.
Russians, too, seem to have greater confidence in the continent than the continent has in itself.
A Kremlin-friendly academic, Alexei Fenenko, speaking to Russian propagandist Olga Skabeyeva on Russia’s Channel One, cautioned against underestimating latent European military strength. “I would not take them lightly,” Fenenko warned, suggesting the prospect of a European alliance of Britain, France, Italy and a rearmed Germany could cause significant military problems for Russia. “These countries have a strong military history and tradition. Quite recently, they were among the strongest armies in the world. So we should not be dismissive of them and underestimate the danger from them.”
There’s also the growing realization that Europe simply might not have a choice, and defense budgets will simply have to rise as the postwar security order suddenly collapses. During an online question and answer session on Feb. 20, France’s President Emmanuel Macron suggested that if the U.S. exited NATO, France would have to massively increase its defense budget, possibly taking it from 2.1% to 5.1% of GDP. On Feb. 25, the U.K. increased its defense spending to 2.5% of GDP, with an “ambition” to increase it to 3% in the next Parliament. The main criticism of this announcement from the Conservative opposition was not that defense spending was being increased during a time of widespread pressure on public finances, but that it wasn’t being increased enough, with former Tory Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace calling it a “a staggering desertion of leadership” to only boost the budget by 0.2%.
After his victory in the German election, incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said his priority was working with fellow EU leaders to “achieve independence from the U.S., step by step.” Coming from Merz, arguably Germany’s foremost Atlanticist, this statement would have been unthinkable only a few months ago. It surely helped that the American executive branch tried to rob Merz of his victory: First came Elon Musk’s feverish endorsement of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and then came Vance’s grimly received speech at the Munich Security Conference, which subtextually amounted to the same thing. Merz likened America’s interference in a German political contest to that of Russia’s and might have added that both were now backing the same stalking horse.
The Kiel Institute, a German economic think tank, estimated that the economic cost to Berlin of allowing Russia to occupy Ukraine would be a staggering “10 to 20 times greater” than the cost of current German support for Kyiv’s fight. Significantly, these figures were calculated while Washington was still viewed as a somewhat reliable ally. German defense spending, if the U.S. definitively abandoned its allies, would have to rise even higher. That would mean abolishing the German “debt brake,” enshrined in the country’s constitution. A turning of the times, you might say. But as historian Tim Garton Ash has argued, Germany has undertaken three pivotal changes in its postwar history when needs and national moods required it: Konrad Adenauer’s embrace of the Western security order in 1949, Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in 1969 and Helmut Kohl’s reunification effort in 1989.
Political will may yet be shaped by economic incentive. War is good business; so, too, is American betrayal. U.S. defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics all saw their stock price drop over the past month; whilst German defense giant Rheinmetall’s surged by a staggering 49% in the same period. Ironically, one of Berlin’s main impediments to ramping up production of weapons is the slow, pettifogging nature of Ukrainian bureaucracy. “We are building plants faster in Germany than in Ukraine,” Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger told German outlet Deutsche Welle at the Munich Security Conference in February. “The reason is that bureaucratic barriers in Germany have been practically removed. For example, for the component manufacturing plant for the F-35 and Europe’s largest ammunition production facility in Lower Saxony, we obtained permits within just a few weeks.”
Currently, no European country has the industrial capability to replace the United States when it comes to production of artillery shells. As of late 2024, the U.S. could produce 50,000 155 millimeter shells, the standard-bearer in NATO artillery, each month — roughly the equivalent of what all of Western Europe can manufacture. However, European defense contractors have not been sitting idle. Rheinmetall alone aims to produce 1.1 million 155 millimeter rounds annually by 2027. According to Andrius Kubilius, European Commissioner for Defence and Space, European countries are expected to produce 2 million shells per year by the end of 2025.
Even so, that doesn’t quite solve the problem of sustaining Ukraine’s war.
“Ukraine doesn’t receive 100% of European production,” Colby Badhwar, an independent defense analyst, told New Lines. “EU and NATO officials have stated in the past that lots of ammunition is being sold abroad, and some countries are prioritizing refilling their own empty stocks. The United States, by comparison, has supplied Ukraine largely out of their own stockpiles, which are not exhausted, and used production to backfill.”
Another hiccup, according to Badhwar, is that most European countries have no cluster munitions to provide Ukraine, owing to a treaty banning their manufacture or stockpiling, which came into effect in 2010. One conspicuous exception here is Turkey, which provided the first of these controversial dual-use, anti-armor and antipersonnel munitions to Kyiv covertly before the Biden administration did so openly in 2024. Though Ankara will have required end-user authorization from Washington, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan might still be able to obtain it given his coziness to Trump. (Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s powerful foreign minister and former spymaster, was in attendance at London’s emergency meeting on Ukraine.)
The market and the U.S. military-industrial complex’s influential lobby may trump, as it were, any ideological tendencies in the White House. Selling arms to Europe, even if Europe plans to donate or sell them to Ukraine, is still a tantalizing prospect for any U.S. administration, all the more for one that makes a big show of running America as a revenue-hungry corporation. One of the major capabilities Europe would be keen to purchase from the United States would be air defense interceptors: the Patriot missiles, particularly the advanced PAC-3 anti-ballistic missile interceptors, that currently defend Kyiv from Russia’s deadliest weapons.
“It is worth noting that the reduction in funding for the American military-industrial complex might primarily harm the United States itself,” Kuzan told New Lines. “Until recently, Washington, while helping Ukraine, actually invested in its own defense and rearmed itself, giving away outdated weapons and ordering the production of modern developments to replace them, updating its fleet of equipment and stocks of missile shells.”
Until such production comes online, Europe will have to find creative solutions. One potential pathway is to follow what the Americans did when they reached an impasse in the last three years — for instance, by replicating the previous Biden-era agreement with South Korea to buy as many 155 millimeter and 105 millimeter shells for Ukraine as Seoul can provide. Such deals could be sweetened by the promise of purchases of South Korean military equipment for domestic use; the excellent South Korean K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer is already in service with multiple European militaries and in consideration for several more.
Another bright spot for Ukraine is that the nature of its defensive war has fundamentally changed in the past 18 months. Artillery is still incredibly important, but it isn’t the battle-winning weapon it was two years ago. “Drones are the most important weapon for us,” “Odesa,” an intelligence officer in the Ukrainian 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade, told one of the authors during a trip to the front lines in the summer of 2024. “Not artillery. Not tanks. Drones.”
Unmanned aerial vehicles now cause the vast majority of casualties on both sides, according to Ukrainian and Russian sources. They’re also vital for battlefield surveillance, with both Ukrainian and Russian commanders using small, commercially available drones to monitor the enemy. “If the U.S. completely refuses military support in the future, as it partially did from the end of 2023 to the spring of 2024, then there will be no catastrophe,” Kuzan said, explaining that Ukraine has been busy developing its own military industrial capability, particularly unmanned systems.
Jack Watling, a military analyst from the British Royal United Services Institute, who has completed multiple field trips to the Ukrainian front line, broadly agrees. “Today, the [Ukrainian armed forces] use large numbers of distributed sensors, UAVs and robotic systems in combination with traditional artillery and armored vehicles to create a 15-kilometer zone in front of its units over which Russian troops are attrited as they advance,” Watling told New Lines. “The result has been to impose a punishing rate of loss on Russian units attempting to attack Ukrainian lines.”
Engagements in 2025 are frequently decided by whichever side can get the largest number of first-person view (FPV) drones into the air. These remotely piloted killing machines are now responsible for anywhere from 60% to 80% of the casualties on both sides. Because of its lack of air superiority and its manpower shortages, Ukraine has invested a lot of money and resources into ensuring it retains the upper hand in FPV drones — in quantity, quality and in the tactics the highly trained Ukrainian pilots use.
And that much is routinely attested by the enemy. Russian soldiers attempting to assault the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk complained on Telegram that the sky was “completely under Ukrainian control.” Footage uploaded by Russians showing the road their soldiers take to the front depicts a gnarl of near-endless wrecked or smoldering Russian vehicles, almost all of them destroyed by Ukrainian FPV drones. “People often ask if FPV drones can replace artillery,” Ukrainian military analyst Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote in another post. “Pokrovsk might be the answer to that question.”
Ukraine has also made ample use of commercially available light reconnaissance drones such as the ubiquitous DJ Mavic 3 to monitor the movement of Russian forces. Just how critical this piece of machinery is was explained by a commander in Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade’s “Vitrolom” drone unit during a recent visit by one of the authors to the front line. “Each Mavic saves the lives of around 40 Ukrainian soldiers,” one drone operator told New Lines. One Mavic costs a mere $5,000, and because they have a nonmilitary function, they’re widely available on international markets, easily purchased and supplied to the front within days.
The reality is that the Russian military is far from the unstoppable colossus the Trump administration seems to believe it is — or wants the American people to believe it is in order to sell them on a shambolic “peace” deal. Much as the popular conception of unlimited Soviet manpower during World War II was a myth (by 1943, the Red Army was suffering from shortages in personnel due to the huge number of casualties it had taken in the previous years), the current Russian military is badly depleted, even with stopgap measures in place such as the deployment of North Korean conscripts to Kursk, the Ukrainian-held enclave in Russia, or offers of higher pay for Russian troops. There are daily farcical scenes of wounded Russian soldiers heading to assaults on crutches. The mass destruction of Russian armor has led to Russian soldiers’ reliance on Ladas, ATVs and other civilian vehicles to head to assaults, and the lack of military trucks has been compensated for by the widespread use of donkeys to carry supplies to the front lines. “We bought this donkey in a cry of despair,” one Russian soldier complained in a video uploaded to Russian social media, standing next to his beast of burden. “Because we have no equipment at all, and I mean it.”
Such deficiencies have led to a predictable collapse in Russian morale. As has been widely reported, soldiers who refuse to fight in such appalling conditions — even those who are heavily wounded — are summarily executed by their colleagues, thrown into “punishment pits” where they are left for weeks, sometimes even months, at a time, or simply tied to trees where they’re left to await an unpleasant death by Ukraine’s drones. Arguably even more important is the emerging evidence Ukraine has finally found a counter to the heavy glide bombs that Russia has been using to help grind out slow and costly advances over the past year. “The golden era of the ‘divine’ UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” one prominent Russian military analyst linked with the Russian air force lamented, referring to the guidance system by which air-dropped bombs become more accurate. The analyst added that Ukrainian advances in electronic warfare had led to that guidance system becoming “useless.”
Ukraine has already translated these Russian woes into tactical successes on the battlefield. In Toretsk, the industrial city in Donetsk that had seen fierce street fighting for months, Ukrainian forces have been staging a successful counterattack against the Russians, advancing in a pincer movement that threatens to cut off a large number of Russian troops. This came three weeks after the Kremlin prematurely announced, on Feb. 7, that they had fully captured the city.
Europe has a far easier task leveraging its economic strength to support Ukraine’s drone revolution. Although not as wealthy as the United States (total European GDP is around $25 trillion compared to America’s $30 trillion), Europe is an economic titan compared to Russia, with its GDP of $2.2 trillion making it less wealthy than either Italy or Brazil. Helping Kyiv manufacture drones at scale is simply a matter of using European wealth to buy up dual-use FPV components on the international market and maintaining a supply chain to Ukrainian drone teams. (This might coincide with ramped up efforts to hamper Russia’s acquisition of the same equipment, which involves bypassing sanctions — not just America’s, which may yet be lifted, but the EU’s.)
Nor is investing in Ukrainian innovation mere charity; armies and air forces in NATO stand to gain from it, as evidenced by the now-global adoption of FPV technology across all battlefields. Burmese rebels use them in Myanmar, Kurdish guerrillas use them in Iraq, Hezbollah uses them in Lebanon and the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham movement, now in control of Syria, used them for years from its localized base in Idlib province. Given Russia’s growing dependency on FPVs, the West will know how to fight with or against them in the very near future.
For decades, Europe has affirmed the need to assume more responsibility for its own security, if not become completely autonomous and independent from the United States. Yet this refrain was always matched by complacent policymaking through cycles of crisis: transnational terrorism, migration flows, populist political upsurges and Brexit. Faced with the largest land war on its soil since 1945, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels could once take solace in a U.S. commander-in-chief reared in the shadow of the Cold War and firmly wedded to the architecture that undergirds that conflict. No longer. America’s recessional — maybe reversible after four years, but maybe not — is unmistakable. The 19th century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen described what’s left when one order dies as, not an heir, but a “pregnant widow.” So Europe finds itself now: a traumatized single parent in waiting.
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