NYT: Europe wants to arm Ukraine, but it’s losing a race against time

President Trump’s insistence that the United States do less toward securing Europe means that allies, scrambling to arm themselves, have less to give to Ukraine, writes ‘The New York Times’.

Since President Trump took office vowing to pull back U.S. support for Ukraine, European leaders have worried that they would be unable to supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs.

So far, it looks like they were right.

The so-called coalition of the willing of European nations backing Ukraine has struggled to get materiel to its battlefields in the time since Mr. Trump made clear that Europe needed to shoulder more of the load for Ukraine’s security and its own.

By summer, military aid approved under the Biden administration will run out, and Mr. Trump appears reluctant to renew it.

“He told me that he needs more weapons, but he’s been saying that for three years,” Mr. Trump said after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last month in Rome. (The Trump administration has allowed Ukraine to buy some small-dollar arms directly from American manufacturers, but not with U.S. government assistance.)

Allies in Europe have collectively given about half of the estimated $130 billion in military support provided to Ukraine since Russia invaded in 2022. The United States sent the rest.

While European leaders and investors appear willing to pump more money into weapons production, industry executives and experts predict it will take a decade to get assembly lines up to speed.

Allies fear that Mr. Trump will pull Russian deterrents, like U.S. troops and the American nuclear umbrella, out of Europe. Focusing on their own protection eats into what other European countries might have given to Ukraine.

“They are hitting the dual problem of having to rearm themselves and supply Ukraine, and industrial capacity isn’t big enough to do both,” said Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, an analytical group affiliated with the British military.

But many of the European military assistance pledged last month at NATO headquarters amounted to commitments for producing or procuring weapons in the years to come, not immediately.

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