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Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
When it comes to safeguarding Ukraine, it could now be up to Europe.
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That is the message from Monday’s phone call between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump touted the conversation as an opportunity for a breakthrough in stalled peace talks, but no breakthrough was on offer.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine had already agreed to Trump’s demand for a thirty-day ceasefire, but Putin once again stonewalled any such talk. As Trump described it on Truth Social, the only outcome of the conversation was a Russian agreement to “immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War.” But negotiations already started on Friday in Turkey, and they did not go anywhere because the Russian side has made clear that it is not relaxing its insistence on addressing the “root causes” of the war.
To Putin, the main “cause” is Ukraine’s unwillingness to accept Russian domination. Hence his unwavering demands for regime change in Kyiv, for limitations on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, and for Ukraine to be unaligned with the West. He also wants to annex four provinces of Ukraine that he declared are part of Russia (five if you count Crimea), though they are not fully under Russian control. There is no chance that Ukrainians will agree to any of these demands—which would spell the end of Ukraine as an independent, sovereign nation—as long as they have the capacity to keep resisting.
But rather than trying to pressure Putin into a ceasefire agreement and forcing him to moderate his demands, Trump appears to be getting ready to wash his hands of the entire conflict. Talking to reporters later on Monday in the Oval Office, Trump said, “Big egos involved, but I think something’s going to happen. And if it doesn’t—just going to have to back away and keep going.”
It is unclear what Trump means by “backing away,” but if that translates into a decline in U.S. pressure on Russia or U.S. aid for Ukraine, that will give Putin precisely what he wants—a chance for his armies to attain on the battlefield the objectives his negotiators cannot secure at the peace table.
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After a short pause to punish Zelenskyy for an Oval Office confrontation, Trump has allowed the pipeline of U.S. aid to Ukraine to continue to flow along with U.S. intelligence. There are even reports that the Trump administration is trying to facilitate the transfer of a Patriot air-defense battery from Israel to Ukraine. But Trump has given no indication that he would send more U.S. aid to Ukraine—or even sell weapons to Ukraine—when the current aid package runs out later this year.
That means it will be largely up to the Europeans to keep Ukraine in the fight. These countries have already done a lot. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the Europeans have allocated 137.9 billion euros in aid to Ukraine, while the United States has provided 114.6 billion euros. In January and February 2025, the United States sent only 500 million euros worth of aid, compared to 6.9 billion euros from Europe.
While Europe has already made an important contribution, it will have to step up its support to make up for a potential U.S. aid cutoff. The Kiel Institute recommends that European countries need to roughly double their average support for Ukraine from 44 billion euros a year to 82 billion euros to fill the U.S. vacuum.
This comes as Europe deals with Trump’s demands that the European members of NATO increase their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP—a substantial increase from the current goal of 2 percent of GDP. (The United States itself only spends 3.4 percent of GDP on defense.) This is sure to be a major sticking point when Trump travels to the Netherlands to meet with his counterparts at the NATO summit on June 24-25. The European countries intend to finesse the U.S. demand with a plan to increase defense budgets to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2032 while allocating an additional 1.5 percent on roads, bridges, airports, seaports, and other infrastructure that could potentially be defense-related.
Aid to Ukraine should be counted as part of the European countries’ defense spending. While it will take time for European countries to ramp up their own defense industries (a process made more difficult by the substantial overlap and duplication among the thirty European members of NATO), European countries can get more bang for their euro quickly by simply investing in Ukraine’s growing defense industry.
This is what’s known as the “Danish model,” after Denmark’s investment in Ukrainian arms plants. It holds the potential to provide Ukraine with most of the weapons it needs to defend itself at much lower cost than if they were manufactured in the United States or Europe.
Ukraine is already manufacturing some 40 percent of the weapons—including nearly all the drones—that it is using in combat, and it has the potential to continue ramping up production with foreign investment. (A Zelenskyy adviser told the Wall Street Journal that Kyiv currently can purchase less than half of what Ukrainian defense companies can manufacture.)
If the United States cuts off Ukraine, the Europeans can and should keep that embattled nation going by making the investments that will allow Ukrainians to defend themselves with Ukrainian-made weapons. As most Europeans realize by now, this is not an act of charity but simple self-defense: If Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he could threaten Finland, the Baltic Republics, and Poland next.
This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.