The White House says pausing military assistance is part of its drive toward peace; many warn it will only embolden Putin.
LONDON — President Donald Trump’s decision to pause American military aid to Ukraine is handing Russia’s Vladimir Putin the upper hand on the battlefield and in geopolitical negotiations, former officials and experts warned Tuesday.
The White House said the defense assistance was being reviewed to make sure it was contributing to the administration’s goal of being “focused on peace.”
Military analysts say that withholding Ukraine’s defensive lifeblood will be “crippling” in a matter of months as it tries to hold back the Russian war machine and defend its cities being bombed nightly.
It will also deepen the chasm between the Trump administration and Washington’s longtime European allies, who are already scrambling to fill the void left by a U.S. government pursuing a rapprochement with their chief antagonist in Moscow.
Michael McFaul, Washington’s former ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, likened the move to President Franklin D. Roosevelt losing “the 1940 election to an America Firster who then had the U.S. switch sides in World War II … We’d all be speaking German now.”
“That’s why this current moment feels like,” he wrote on X. “Three years into a war between an imperialist dictatorship with autocratic allies and a democracy, Trump just switched sides.”
On the battlefield, “Ukraine is not going to run out of bullets tomorrow,” said Michael A. Horowitz, a geopolitical and security analyst who is the head of intelligence at the Le Beck consultancy. “But a suspension of military aid would have a very noticeable impact on the conflict that would become visible in the coming months.”
The United States has given $65.9 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. That’s far more than any other country (the second highest is Germany’s $13 billion, according to the Kiel Institute think tank.) In fact, the U.S. contributions are so large that they roughly equal all other nations’ aid put together.
A significant part of the American aid has been to supply Ukraine with air defense missiles, which not only protect Kyiv’s military positions but also civilians in cities, which have been targeted by the Russian military. It is also crucial in giving Ukraine artillery, which it has used to slow Russian advances over the winter. And it has been central in training the Ukrainians how to use this equipment, maintaining and repairing it, as well as providing transport.
Europe could pick up some of this slack, but it will be near impossible to do so completely, Horowitz said. And while removing American support would not cause issues immediately, in time “they will become quite crippling,” he added.
Likewise, though Ukraine receives some ammunition from Europe, “uncertainty about future U.S. aid shipments could lead Ukraine to begin rationing ammunition,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank.
Ultimately this “will lead to higher casualties for Ukrainian forces,” he told NBC News.
In the skies, Ukraine relies on the U.S. to supply the interceptor missiles for its Patriot air defense systems. “Without them, Ukraine will have more difficultly protecting its cities from Russian missile strikes,” Lee said.
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It also has no effective replacement for the multiple guided missiles, which the U.S. supplies for its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which have been used to great effect against Russia.
Added to that, “Ukraine already faces a manpower shortage, so the loss of U.S. aid will pose greater challenges for Ukraine,” Lee said.
The decision to pause aid comes after a meeting between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy descended into a shouting match Friday. They berated Zelenskyy for not being grateful enough for their support, and said he was not ready for peace.
However, Ukraine’s European allies do not see arming Ukraine as altruistic or something deserving of gratitude.
Instead, they see the war as the front line of a wider conflict already raging between Russia and the West, one that Putin will only seek to expand — possibly into other European countries — if he emerges with a win in Ukraine.
Cutting aid to Ukraine would not achieve a “sustainable peace” that Trump and his team say they want, so this argument goes, but rather allow the Kremlin to regroup ready for its next aggression — knowing that the U.S. no longer has the appetite to punish it.
The Europeans, including NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, have touted their own version of what they call “peace through strength.”
This involves helping Ukraine pressure Russia on the battlefield to gain favorable conditions on the negotiating table.
Arming Ukraine “offers the United States great leverage in peace negotiations,” according to an analysis the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington defense think tank, published Monday before the news came through. “A suspension of ongoing U.S. military assistance to Ukraine would encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to continue to increase his demands and fuel his conviction that he can achieve total victory through war,” it said.
The realization that Washington is no longer willing to underwrite European and Ukrainian security has prompted the Europeans to make moves of their own.
While news of Trump’s Ukraine aid hiatus was reverberating across the continent, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set out proposals that could raise some 800 billion euro in defense spending (around $840 billion) — almost double European’s collective annual defense budget.
“We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times,” she said in a speech. “I do not need to describe the grave nature of the threats that we face. Or the devastating consequences that we will have to endure if those threats would come to pass.”
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