Trump to Meet NATO Secretary General as Plan Takes Shape for Ukraine Weapons Sales
Rutte will be in Washington on Monday and Tuesday and plans to hold talks with Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as well as members of Congress.
'I'm gonna have a meeting with the secretary general who's coming in tomorrow,' Trump told reporters as he arrived in Washington on Sunday night. 'But we basically are going to send them various pieces of very sophisticated (weapons) and they're gonna pay us 100% for them.'
A top ally of Trump, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said Sunday that the conflict is nearing an inflection point as Trump shows growing interest in helping Ukraine fight back Russia. It's a cause that Trump, who during his campaign made quickly ending the war a top priority, had previously dismissed as being a waste of U.S. taxpayer money.
'In the coming days, you'll see weapons flowing at a record level to help Ukraine defend themselves,' Graham said on CBS' 'Face the Nation.' He added: 'One of the biggest miscalculations (Russian President Vladimir) Putin has made is to play Trump. And you just watch, in the coming days and weeks, there's going to be a massive effort to get Putin to the table.'
The Rutte visit comes after Trump last week teased that he would make a 'major statement' on Russia on Monday and as Ukraine struggles to repel massive and complex air assaults launched by Russian forces. Trump on Sunday declined to offer further details on his coming announcement.
'We're going to see what we will see tomorrow,' he said.
Graham and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who also appeared on CBS, said there is also growing consensus on Capitol Hill and among European officials about tapping some of the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen by Group of Seven countries early in the war to help Ukraine.
'It's time to do it,' Blumenthal said.
Rubio said Friday that some of the U.S.-made weapons that Ukraine is seeking are deployed with NATO allies in Europe. Those weapons could be more quickly transferred to Ukraine, with European countries buying replacements from the U.S., he said.
French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu, in an interview published Sunday in La Tribune Dimanche, said European officials have been making the case to the Trump administration to bolster air defense capabilities with any coming packages.
He added that France is in a 'capacity hole' and will have to wait until next year before being able to provide Ukraine new ground-air missiles.
Trump is also facing calls from Republicans and Democrats as well as European allies to support legislation in the Senate that aims to cripple Russia's oil industry and hit Moscow with U.S. sanctions for its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
The legislation, in part, calls for a 500% tariff on goods imported from countries that continue to buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other exports. It would have an enormous impact on the economies of Brazil, China and India, which account for the vast majority of Russia's energy trade.
'The big offender here is China, India and Brazil,' Graham said. 'My goal is to end this war. And the only way you are going to end this war is to get people who prop up Putin — make them choose between the American economy and helping Putin.'
That revenue is critical in helping keep the Russian war machine humming as the U.S. and Europe have imposed significant import and export bans on a wide range of goods to and from Russia, affecting sectors like finance, energy, transport, technology and defense.
Trump for months had threatened, but held off on, imposing new sanctions against Russia's oil industry.
But the Republican leader has become increasingly exasperated with Putin in recent days and has repeatedly laid into the Russian leader for prolonging the war.
'He talks so beautifully and then he'll bomb people at night,' Trump said in his latest broadside against Putin. 'We don't like that.'
Congress has been prepared to act on the legislation, sponsored by Graham and Blumenthal, for some time.
The bill has overwhelming support in the Senate, but Republican leadership has been waiting for Trump to give the green light before moving ahead with it.
The White House had expressed some reservations about the legislation. Trump made clear he wants full authority over the waiver process to lift the sanctions, tariffs or other penalties, without having to cede control to Congress.
Under the initial bill, the president 'may terminate' the penalties under certain circumstances, but immediately reimpose them if the violations resume. Graham has said the president would be allowed to waive the sanctions, for 180 days, and could also renew a waiver.
Some Democratic lawmakers have expressed concerns about the waivers. But Blumenthal downplayed the differences and said the legislation would give Trump a 'sledgehammer' to utilize on Putin.
'The waiver language we will have in this bill is very much like the provisions have existed in past similar measures,' Blumenthal said. He added, 'What I think is most important right now is our unity.'
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Others are concerned it would take years to get the funds released once seized, because of the legal challenges that Russia would certainly mount in international courts — and might even win. To date, there have been attempts to satisfy everybody. First it was using only the interest on the Russian assets to support Ukraine, producing an initial biannual payment of €1.5 billion ($1.75 billion) in July last year — a rounding error on Ukraine's needs. Then, in October, the Groupd of Seven countries agreed to leverage those interest payments by using them to service $50 billion in loans. This still falls short of the scale needed to tilt the field against Putin. Replacing the U.S. military and financial aid provided by President Joe Biden's administration would cost about $45 billion a year for the duration of the war. This is objectively affordable and also rational, given the much higher cost of dealing with a vengeful Russia that takes control of Ukraine. On top of that, Europe will need to do more than pay Trump to continue U.S. aid, if it's to persuade Putin that he has no chance of achieving his maximalist goals in Ukraine. One useful baseline as to how much more is the unused arms-manufacturing capacity that Ukraine has available, but can't to put work, because the government lacks funds to place the orders. This year, the shortfall is $19 billion, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's strategic adviser, Oleksandr Kamyshin. So now we are talking in the range of an extra $64 billion a year for Europe to find, which is not politically sustainable. There are several proposals for getting around the legal hurdles involved in using all of the frozen Russian assets to fill this gap. One elegant solution recently published would allow the entire pool to be offered to Ukraine as loans. These would be repayable to Russia, but only if and when it abided by the restitution award that a postwar international tribunal will most certainly make, given the clear illegality of Putin's invasion. And since the World Bank estimates Ukraine's reconstruction bill at $524 billion and counting, any such award is highly likely to cover the full $300 billion of Russian assets. I can't be sure how a court would view this plan. Yet the logic of its proponents — Lee Buchheit, an American lawyer who spent a career specializing in sovereign debt, U.K. journalist Hugo Dixon and the French European Parliament legislator Nathalie Loiseau — is clear. The Russian assets would not change ownership, but merely custodianship, unless Moscow refused to pay duly awarded damages. At that point, a court order would seize them with full due process. The loans would be made in tranches to ensure not only that Ukraine gets money at a rate it can efficiently use, but also to give Putin one more reason to halt his invasion. Should he do so, the loan system also would reduce the future fatalities and destruction for which Russia must compensate. Whether this particular proposal is adopted isn't the critical point, which is that a nontaxpayer source for funding Ukraine's defense has long been hiding in plain sight. It's time to fully use Russia's frozen assets if all the lofty talk of urgency from European leaders — most recently at last week's Ukraine recovery conference in Rome — is to have meaning. Putin's no fool. He knows it isn't politically viable for the Europeans to finance the war on their own for long and that he can outwait them. The best way to turn Trump's commercialization of U.S. foreign policy into a strategy for ending the war is if the additional financial burden it creates does not depend on the lasting goodwill of European taxpayers, but rather on the Kremlin's own central bank reserves. Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East.
