EU backs Trump Ukraine U-turn but wants US to 'share burden'

The European Union's foreign affairs chief may be having something of an "I told you so" moment as US President Donald Trump reverses his past praise of Vladimir Putin and vows to ramp up pressure on Moscow.

"We see from the United States that they have also realized that Russia does not really want peace," Kaja Kallas told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday.

The former Estonian prime minister made a name for herself as one of Ukraine's staunchest political backers, and warned at this week's EU talks that Russia's bombing campaign had "reached record levels."

Kallas and many of her EU counterparts welcomed Washington's shift in rhetoric as they filed into a meeting. "What we experienced yesterday with the new messages from Trump was very, very important," Denmark's Lars Lokke Rasmussen said.

But some of the EU's top brass also had notes for the US on its latest announcements, including Washington's threat to slap 100% secondary tariffs on Russia and countries that trade with it unless a peace deal with Ukraine is reached by early September.

"The 50 days that Mr. Trump has announced is rather long," Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp said on the sidelines of Tuesday's talks.

Weapons deal details still under discussion

Trump also made headlines Monday with anannouncement that he'd be greenlighting sales of Patriot air defense systems and other arms to European countries to send on to Ukraine, just two weeks after Washington paused some arms shipments to Kyiv.


The new plan should speed up and expand deliveries of US arms which Ukraine says it needs as it faces increased Russian aerial attacks.

Some European countries have already been buying and sending US-made weapons to Kyiv, though the latest scheme could offer more certainty on the permissions needed to swiftly transfer the arms. A US commitment to sell replacements for American-made weapons sent to Ukraine could also encourage European states to ship more of their own military supplies.

NATO chief Mark Rutte said the deal would "work through NATO systems" and that European countries including Germany, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands were all interested in taking part.

But the US is yet to disclose more details of its new scheme and DW understands the technicalities of exactly how it will work are still being discussed.

EU says US should 'share the burden'

Trump was, however, quick to cast the new deal as a lucrative business opportunity for the US, stressing Europe would foot the bill. And that seems to be raising some eyebrows among his counterparts across the Atlantic.

The EU's Kallas told reporters after Tuesday's meeting that she would like to see Europe and the US "share the burden" of arming Ukraine.

"If we pay for these weapons, it's our support — so it's European support — and we are doing as much as we can to help Ukraine. And therefore the call is that everybody would do the same," she said.

"If you promise to give the weapons then say that somebody else is going to pay for it, it's not really given by you, is it?" Kallas added.

Denmark's Rasmussen made a similarly veiled allusion. "We are providing a lot of funding for Ukraine to buy whatever weapons and ammunition they need … But I mean, I would very much like to see all our partners actually also contributing if we want this war to stop," he said.

While the US ranks as Ukraine's single largest donor since its full-scale invasion by Russia, the European Union as a whole has spent roughly the same amount as Washington over the same period, according to data from the Kiel Institute cited by Radio Free Europe. The EU outspends the US when the cost of hosting and assisting Ukrainian refugees is factored in.

Turning point or just one U-Turn?

EU states may be breathing a sigh of relief after the US policy shift, but policy analyst Torrey Taussig says it's too soon to judge whether Trump's stance has changed for good.

"There has been a seesaw approach to this relationship throughout the last several months of this administration, and I wouldn't be surprised if this relationship, the US-Ukrainian relationship, still has more turns that it can take," the former US government official turned Atlantic Council fellow told DW.

"I'm very reluctant to call this a strategic shift in the US-Ukrainian relationship," she added, though added that the two sides' ties now seem far more "positive."

Bye-bye to 'Buy European'?

With European countries racing to boost their own defenses amid pressure from the US and a broader rethink of the EU's geopolitical fragility, governments have been debating how much of a planned military spending splurge should go to US weapons.

Arms purchases, especially those involving large weapons systems, tend to lock the buyer into a years-long relationship with the seller, from production to delivery to future repairs.

Experts say ending Europe's dependency on the American-made weapons, logistics and intelligence capacities it lacks could take at least a decade — and with US foreign policy proving unpredictable, that leaves some worried.

EU heavyweight France has pushed for more European-only purchases, frustrating some other states which argued this only serves to slow down the process of getting weapons into European and Ukrainian hands.

The latest US-led plan may be seen by some as a blow to France's efforts, with the potential for more European money to flow toward US arms manufacturers.

EU fails to greenlight fresh round of Russia sanctions

As Europe nudges the US to do more to support Ukraine and punish Russia, the bloc's own efforts are faltering. Kallas said she was "really sad" that ministers failed to adopt an 18th round of EU sanctions on Moscow on Tuesday due to a holdout by Slovakia.
The landlocked central European state has been protesting planned EU laws to ban all sales of Russian gas, and Prime Minister Roberto Fico said in an online post on Tuesday that Slovakia had asked the EU to postpone the vote on sanctions while his government mulled its response to an exchange with the EU's executive aimed at ending the stalemate.
Kallas said she was "optimistic" an agreement could be struck among EU states in the coming days.