A member of Ukraine’s 14th Mechanised Brigade prepares to fire on the Russian front line near Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, in May. President Donald Trump’s new plan to send US weapons to Ukraine and his threat to impose harsh penalties on Russia’s trading partners reflect a dramatic shift in his position on the war. Photo / Tyler Hicks, the New York Times
President Donald Trump’s new plan to send weapons to Ukraine and his simultaneous threat of harsh penalties on Russia’s trading partners reflect a dramatic shift in his position on the war, but his proposals leave key details unclear.
Speaking alongside Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the White House yesterday, Trump said that Patriot air defence systems and other arms would “quickly” be transferred to Ukraine, which is in desperate need of more weapons to fend off Russia’s invasion.
Trump said the United States would sell those arms to European nations, which would ship them to Ukraine or use them to replace weapons they send to the country from their existing stocks.
Pentagon officials said later that many details were still being worked out.
And experts doubted the credibility of Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on Russia’s trading partners if President Vladimir Putin did not agree to a ceasefire within 50 days.
The scale of China’s mutual trade with Russia — nearly US$250 billion ($418b) per year, including huge oil imports — means that delivering on the threat would throw Trump into a showdown with Beijing.
Analysts said it was unlikely that Trump would risk a renewed confrontation with the world’s second-largest economy over Ukraine, a country whose fate he has long said is not vital to the US.
Trump is also notorious for setting deadlines that he does not enforce, raising questions about whether he will act if the 50-day timer he has set for Putin expires.
Trump’s words were welcomed in Ukraine and by its supporters in Washington, who feared just a few months ago that the US President was prepared to abandon the country’s defence against Russia.
But after years of courting Putin as an ally, Trump has come to see the Russian leader as the main obstacle to fulfilling his promises of swiftly ending the war.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, praised Trump’s shift: “Today’s decision to send additional Patriot batteries to Ukraine, made possible through the meaningful investments of our European partners, will save countless Ukrainian lives from Putin’s horrific assault”.
The approach, which Nato leaders conceived of, and Trump approved last week, illustrates the way Rutte and his colleagues have cracked the Trump code and found a way to work productively with the US President.
During his first term, Trump repeatedly criticized Nato and even mused about a US withdrawal from the military alliance.
“I have to tell you, Europe has a lot of spirit for this war,” Trump said yesterday. “When I first got involved, I really didn’t think they did, but they do.”
The plan also suggests that a concerted European effort to shift Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine and its President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has gained traction.
Trump berated the Ukrainian leader as insolent and ungrateful during a televised Oval Office meeting in February but has since repaired his relationship with Zelenskyy.
Trump was pleased by Ukraine’s acceptance in April of a deal to share its mineral wealth with the US. And by yesterday he was speaking of the “tremendous courage” of Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Like the minerals deal, the plan Trump announced yesterday plays to his transactional nature and promises a windfall for the US from Europe’s purchase of American weapons.
It also shields a president who long questioned the Biden Administration’s many transfers of arms and money to Ukraine from charges that he is changing course and throwing more money at the war.
Russian state media quickly sought to promote the idea of Trump’s political jeopardy: “If Trump Folds to Neocons on Ukraine, MAGA Base Will Bury Him as Biden 2.0,” read one headline in the Kremlin-funded website Sputnik.
However, much depends on what Trump’s words really mean.
“Billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment is going to be purchased from the US,” Trump said. “That’s going to be quickly distributed to the battlefield.” Some of the new aid could begin arriving within “days”.
The deliveries to Ukraine would include additional US-made Patriot air defence systems, Trump said. Ukraine already has some Patriots but has pleaded for more.
Trump said there were “a couple of countries” with Patriot systems that would give them to Ukraine and then buy replacements from the US. But he did not identify those countries. Last week, Zelenskyy said Germany and Norway were prepared to buy Patriots for the war effort if Trump approved.
Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at Defence Priorities, a think-tank that advocates for a restrained military policy abroad, said Putin had rebuffed US peace overtures because “he is not ready to stop fighting”.
“He assesses, rightly in my view, that Russia has the battlefield advantage and that there is not much that the US or Europe can do to pressure him or impose meaningful costs,” she said.
“More aid to Ukraine is unlikely to shift the military balance in a major way, and Putin is prepared to weather the costs of additional sanctions.”
Kavanagh, who believes that a US strategy of indefinitely arming Ukraine is “not sustainable”, added that the size of existing weapons stockpiles in Europe and the US limits what can be sent to Ukraine in the near future.
Europe, whose defence industrial base is much smaller than America’s, can order new weapons, but those deliveries may not arrive for months or years.
Much was also unclear about Trump’s economic threats, including how plausible they are.
While Trump declared he was ready to impose 100% tariffs on both Russia and its trading partners after 50 days without a ceasefire deal, direct tariffs on US imports from Russia would have no meaningful effect on Russia’s economy.
The US imported only about US$3b in Russian goods in 2024, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative. Most of that consists of Russian exports to the US that have been deemed essential, including fertiliser, iron, steel and uranium for US nuclear reactors. It is unclear whether Trump intends to limit that commerce. The US in turn only exports a paltry US$500 million in goods to Russia.
Trump’s threat to impose “secondary” tariffs on any country that trades with Russia could have far more impact, particularly when it comes to Russia’s energy sector.
The Russian economy has weathered punishing sanctions largely thanks to its continued oil and gas exports to nations that are not part of the Western-led sanctions regime.
China and India in particular are lifelines, having taken advantage of the lower energy prices Russia can command since losing its Western buyers after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Both countries pour the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars annually into Kremlin coffers.
India may have room to cut back: While it now imports nearly 40% of its oil from Russia, before 2022, that figure was just 1%. But Russia is a major trading partner for China, and even before 2022 accounted for more than 15% of China’s oil imports.
Edward Fishman, a former State Department official and an expert on Russia sanctions, noted that Trump had already backed down once from threatened tariffs of more than 125% on Chinese exports.
“If the goal here is to reduce Russia’s energy exports, it won’t work,” he wrote on social media.
Many close US allies, including Japan and the European Union, also do substantial business with Russia.
Trump knows that sharply reduced Russian energy exports would drive up global oil prices, hitting American consumers at the petrol pump, shaking markets and spurring general inflation.
Trump’s promise of additional aid comes amid a drawn-out, slow-moving Russian ground offensive in eastern Ukraine and nightly bombardments by Russian drones and missiles throughout the country.
Both the long-range strikes and the trench fighting has grown bloodier this year, even as ceasefire talks began, according to United Nations tallies of civilian deaths and analysts’ estimates of military casualties.
In its most recent advances, the Russian Army, in vicious fighting in ravines and oak forests, pushed 10km into Ukraine in the northeastern Sumy region before largely stalling.
Russia has also tightened partial encirclements of two cities, Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka, in eastern Ukraine in recent months.
Russia has increased the volume of exploding drones and decoys it launches daily this year, creating a dire need in Ukraine for interceptor drones, shoulder-fired missiles such as Stingers and air-to-air missiles for F-16 fighter jets to down drones.
The Patriots are reserved for fast-flying Russian ballistic missiles and are the only defence against one Russian model regularly fired at Kyiv and other targets.
While Kavanagh does not expect Trump’s ultimatum to change Putin’s calculus, she said that Trump’s 50-day deadline will coincide with the arrival of autumn and the end of Russia’s summer offensive.
“I do think that there could be a window for negotiations” after the offensive ends, she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Crowley, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes
Photograph by: Tyler Hicks
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