Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU's Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
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Recent news from Ukraine has generally been bad. Since the end of May, ever larger Russian air strikes have been documented against Ukrainian cities with devastating consequences for civilians, including in the country’s capital, Kyiv.
Amid small and costly but steady gains along the almost 1,000km long frontline, Russia reportedly took full control of the Ukrainian region of Luhansk, part of which it had already occupied before the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
And according to Dutch and German intelligence reports, some of Russia’s gains on the battlefield are enabled by the widespread use of chemical weapons.
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It was therefore something of a relief that Nato’s summit in The Hague produced a short joint declaration on June 25 in which Russia was clearly named as a “long-term threat … to Euro-Atlantic security”. Member states restated “their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine”. While the summit declaration made no mention of future Nato membership for Ukraine, the fact that US president Donald Trump agreed to these two statements was widely seen as a success.
Yet, within a week of the summit, Washington paused the delivery of critical weapons to Ukraine, including Patriot air defence missiles and long-range precision-strike rockets. The move was ostensibly in response to depleting US stockpiles.
This despite the Pentagon’s own analysis, which suggested that the shipment – authorised by the former US president Joe Biden last year – posed no risk to US ammunition supplies.
This was bad news for Ukraine. The halt in supplies weakens Kyiv’s ability to protect its large population centres and critical infrastructure against intensifying Russian airstrikes. It also puts limits on Ukraine’s ability to target Russian supply lines and logistics hubs behind the frontlines that have been enabling ground advances.
Despite protests from Ukraine and an offer from Germany to buy Patriot missiles from the US for Ukraine, Trump has been in no rush to reverse the decision by the Pentagon.
Another phone call with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on July 3, failed to change Trump’s mind, even though he acknowledged his disappointment with the clear lack of willingness by the Kremlin to stop the fighting. What’s more, within hours of the call between the two presidents, Moscow launched the largest drone attack of the war against Kyiv.
A day later, Trump spoke with Zelensky. And while the call between them was apparently productive, neither side gave any indication that US weapons shipments to Ukraine would resume quickly.
Trump previously paused arms shipments and intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March, 2025 after his acrimonious encounter with Zelensky in the Oval Office. But the US president reversed course after certain concessions had been agreed – whether that was an agreement by Ukraine to an unconditional ceasefire or a deal on the country’s minerals.
It is not clear with the current disruption whether Trump is after yet more concessions from Ukraine. The timing is ominous, coming after what had appeared to be a productive Nato summit with a unified stance on Russia’s war of aggression. And it preceded Trump’s call with Putin.
This could be read as a signal that Trump was still keen to accommodate at least some of the Russian president’s demands in exchange for the necessary concessions from the Kremlin to agree, finally, the ceasefire that Trump had once envisaged he could achieve in 24 hours.
If this is indeed the case, the fact that Trump continues to misread the Russian position is deeply worrying. The Kremlin has clearly drawn its red lines on what it is after in any peace deal with Ukraine.
These demands – virtually unchanged since the beginning of the war – include a lifting of sanctions against Russia and no Nato membership for Ukraine, while also insisting that Kyiv must accept limits on its future military forces and recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and four regions on the Ukrainian mainland.
This will not change as a result of US concessions to Russia but only through pressure on Putin. And Trump has so far been unwilling to apply pressure in a concrete and meaningful way beyond the occasional hints to the press or on social media.
It is equally clear that Russia’s maximalist demands are unacceptable to Ukraine and its European allies. With little doubt that the US can no longer be relied upon to back the European and Ukrainian position, Kyiv and Europe need to accelerate their own defence efforts.
A European coalition of the willing to do just that is slowly taking shape. It straddles the once more rigid boundaries of EU and Nato membership and non-membership, involving countries such as Moldova, Norway and the UK. and including non-European allies including Canada, Japan and South Korea.
The European commission’s white paper on European defence is an obvious indication that the threat from Russia and the needs of Ukraine are being taken seriously and, crucially, acted upon. It mobilises some €800 billion (£690 billion) in defence spending and will enable deeper integration of the Ukrainian defence sector with that of the European Union.
At the national level, key European allies, in particular Germany, have also committed to increased defence spending and stepped up their forward deployment of forces closer to the borders with Russia.
US equivocation will not mean that Ukraine is now on the brink of losing the war against Russia. Nor will Europe discovering its spine on defence put Kyiv immediately in a position to defeat Moscow’s aggression.
After decades of relying on the US and neglecting their own defence capabilities, these recent European efforts are a first step in the right direction. They will not turn Europe into a military heavyweight overnight. But they will buy time to do so.
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US backs Nato’s latest pledge of support for Ukraine, but in reality seems to have abandoned its European partners – The Conversation
