President Donald Trump has largely turned his attention away from the ongoing war in Ukraine — and Europe has stopped waiting for him to refocus.
Nearly two months into the Iran war, Trump’s preoccupation with the Middle East has turned Ukraine into an afterthought inside the West Wing, and an organizing principle across the Atlantic.
“Things seem to be stuck and need new momentum,” said a European official who, like others interviewed for this report, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
But the last 24 hours confirmed that this is increasingly wishful thinking — that Trump, at this moment, is more interested in castigating and perhaps even punishing European powers than in working together. On Wednesday, Trump lashed out at Germany’s chancellor on social media, shocked the Pentagon by threatening to reduce America’s troop presence in three European countries and held a lengthy call with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which they agreed to a short ceasefire without conferring with Ukraine.
In another moment, any one of those would have triggered crisis meetings throughout European capitals. But few in Europe feel like the sky is falling — because, in many ways, it’s already fallen, and other leaders have already started to adapt, including through the possible formation of a European Defence Union.
“While the president and his team are working towards a deal that will ensure Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, they also continue to make progress to end the war between Russia and Ukraine,” Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “The president remains optimistic that there will ultimately be a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia to end the senseless killing.”
But the volume has clearly been turned down on Ukraine in the West Wing.
Prior to Trump’s phone call with Putin, a senior White House official said they couldn’t recall the last time they heard anyone talking about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“Iran has definitely become the primary focus,” said the senior official, who was granted anonymity to discuss topics they weren’t authorized to discuss publicly.
The president’s top two envoys involved in dialogue with Russia and Ukraine, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, “are working mostly on Iran,” the official continued, although they acknowledged that some communication with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts has continued to take place.
For the Europeans, Trump’s diverted attention and pointed broadsides have given them newfound clarity about the urgent imperative of more autonomy and independence from Washington. At the same time, the war in Iran has boosted Ukraine’s confidence, making its own advancing military capabilities abundantly clear to allies in Europe and beyond.
“It’s all adding up,” said a second European official. “The impact of the war in Iran and the current blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is huge and negative for Ukraine and Europe. If anything, it has strengthened European resolve to stand by Ukraine.”
While the Iran war and ensuing energy supply crisis have been a boon to Putin, Ukraine has opened up a new revenue stream by inking deals with European and Gulf allies desperate for its drone defense technology. “Countries have started realizing that they need Ukraine as much as they need us,” the European official said. “Both their combat experience and their technology.”
The European Union, which is looking to fast-track Ukraine’s membership in some form, finally approved its €90 billion loan for Ukraine following the defeat of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who’d been blocking it. And European weapons producers are scrambling to increase manufacturing capacity amid growing questions about whether the U.S. will deliver the weapons purchased by NATO for use in Ukraine under the PURL initiative now that the Iran war has reduced its stockpiles.
“The U.S. had assured us that weapons already paid for under PURL would be delivered,” said a third European official. “But I have doubts regarding further packages given U.S. needs.”
Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who courted Trump’s support assiduously for the last year, appears to be moving away from convincing the U.S. to stay involved, and instead strategizing how to operate without it.
He’s been more circumspect about future U.S. involvement and is now looking to Turkey to host the next round of negotiations with Russia. In Ukraine, faith in future U.S. support has fallen fast. According to a new national poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, only 40 percent of the country believe the U.S. will provide the necessary support, down 17 points from the January survey. And the number of people who say they trust potential future security guarantees from the U.S. has decreased from 39 percent to 27 percent over the same period.
Zelenskyy this week ripped Vice President JD Vance for saying earlier this month that halting U.S. defense aid for Ukraine and making Europeans pay for it is “one of the things I’m proudest [of].”
“If JD Vance is proud that he’s not helping us, it means that he is helping Russians, and I’m not sure that it’s strengthening the United States,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Newsmax. “Russia is the enemy. They will always be enemies with the United States.”
Richard Haass, the longtime president of the Council on Foreign Relations, agreed, writing Thursday on Substack that “the U.S. policy of tilting toward Russia and abandoning Ukraine is a ‘shanda,’ something shameful. It is also a strategic error of the first order.”
For much of Trump’s first year back in office, European leaders looked to mollify Trump with flattery, swallowed higher tariffs and committed to increased defense spending. All of it was viewed as a price worth paying to keep the president from turning on Ukraine, cutting off intelligence sharing or weapons purchases and seeking a new bilateral economic agreement with Moscow.
But the differences between the Trump administration and European allies are starting to look irreconcilable. Trump has pivoted from threatening earlier this year to seize Greenland from Denmark to lashing out at and even wanting to punish specific NATO allies over their refusal to join the war in Iran — a war that has pushed the Ukraine war and the broader, existential matter of European security, to the back burner at the White House.
There have been other signals that the administration’s attention is shifting beyond Ukraine.
The acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Julie Davis, announced she will depart her post in the coming weeks over reported differences with the president. And Republicans this week pressured Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a closed-door briefing and publicly about why the Pentagon had yet to release the $400 million in Ukraine aid that Congress had appropriated months ago (Hegseth announced Wednesday that the money was finally being released).
Former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky blasted the Trump administration in an Op-Ed for the Washington Post, questioning not only the holdup of the modest amount of funding. “Hesitating to give Ukraine what it needs weakens its capacity to defend against aggression and hampers the prospects of diplomacy,” wrote McConnell, who also asked why officials haven’t yet traveled to Ukraine to observe its advancements in battlefield technologies. “If we’re serious about “drone dominance,” we shouldn’t sandbag a relationship with the world’s foremost drone experts.”
Across Europe, longtime allies are thinking about new coalitions. EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius this week renewed his pitch for non-EU countries like the United Kingdom, Norway and Ukraine to join a new European Defence Union to better integrate defense capabilities outside of the EU itself, which he said would amount to “a strong security guarantee for Ukraine after a just peace will be established.”
And the 27 EU member states preparing to meet with 20 other neighboring countries in Armenia under the auspices of the European Political Community have, for the first time, invited a non-European leader to take part — not the president of the United States but Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose cri de coeur from Davos about the need to accept the new geopolitical reality may have hastened a broader continental effort to reduce dependencies on — and vulnerabilities to — Washington.
Trump’s prioritizing of Iran over Ukraine, is “leading Europeans to prepare more urgently for collective security outside of the United States’ Article V commitment,” Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, said.
Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in an interview last week, called for “a strong European [defense] pillar” in light of the new reality.
“Since childhood, I have admired the United States. I saw the United States as a natural leader of the free world,” Rasmussen said during an appearance on Euro News. “It’s been painful to conclude that we have to reduce our dependence on the United States, but that is the state of affairs today.”
But European officials acknowledge that it’s a slow process to separate after decades of dependence on the U.S. And some still believe that Trump must be a catalyst when it comes to ending the war in Ukraine.
“Continued US engagement is necessary though because they have serious leverage,” the first European official said. “It would be great to see U.S. negotiators visit Kyiv. At minimum, the US should continue military and intelligence support to Ukraine. But I think Europeans could assume a greater role and bring a new dynamic to the talks, provided the Americans keep supporting Ukraine and help guarantee whatever is agreed. After all, Trump wants this war to end.”
Veronika Melkozerova contributed to this report.
