Why Ukraine Fell Down the Agenda at the NATO Summit

Miami Herald

4 hours ago

KYIV, Ukraine -- It was yet another grim sign for Ukraine.
Russia's invasion of the country, the main topic of recent NATO summits, seemed to slide down the list of priorities at this year's annual meeting, which ended Wednesday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was not feted as in years past. He was not even the center of attention.
Instead, President Donald Trump took main stage at The Hague, where the summit was held. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for NATO, his desire for members to stop relying too heavily on U.S. military support and his admiration of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The summit's official declaration mentioned nothing about Ukraine joining the alliance, a long-standing point of discussion. A meeting between Zelenskyy and Trump yielded no specific promises about peace talks, although Trump said it was possible that the United States would send more Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine.
'Ukraine? What's Ukraine?' quipped Michael John Williams, a former adviser to NATO and now a professor of international relations at Syracuse University who attended the summit. 'The Europeans were saying how committed they are to Ukraine, especially the British, which is no surprise. But there was also really an attempt to keep controversial issues off the table. Ukraine wasn't the front-and-center discussion it has been.'
Everyone at the two-day meeting seemed to be trying to please Trump. Zelenskyy even wore a black suit jacket to meet with him, a rare abandonment of his military-style outfit -- a fashion choice that has stuck in the craw of Trump and his allies in the past.
The two leaders met for 50 minutes; it was their second meeting since their disastrous encounter at the White House in late February, when Trump publicly berated the Ukrainian president. Zelenskyy said the talks were 'long and meaningful' and thanked Trump. The U.S. president said Zelenskyy 'couldn't have been nicer' but added that they did not discuss a ceasefire.
In recent weeks, the news has also been bad for Ukraine on the ground.
Russia has intensified attacks on civilians. A barrage of ballistic missiles Tuesday killed at least 20 people and injured more than 300 others in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, according to Ukrainian officials. Aerial attacks Monday killed at least 10 people in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, Ukrainian officials said. On Wednesday, the United Nations said the number of civilian casualties in the first five months of 2025 was nearly 50% higher than in the same period in 2024.
Russia's summer offensive is gaining territory on the battlefield, with small groups of troops crossing into the Dnipropetrovsk region of eastern Ukraine for the first time in three years.
Halyna Konovalova, 75, who lives in Druzhkivka, a town about 15 miles from the front lines in the Donetsk region, said recently that she worried the fighting would soon reach her. The distant booms of artillery already echoed every few minutes in her garden, where she grows parsley, cucumbers and tomatoes.
'We need help,' she said. 'Weapons to defend ourselves with. And what will we defend ourselves with if America won't help?'
Last week, the crisis in the Middle East overshadowed Ukraine's pleas for help at the meeting of the Group of 7 major industrialized nations in Canada. Trump left the meeting early to deal with the Israel-Iran conflict and canceled a meeting with Zelenskyy. He also rejected the idea of issuing a joint statement in support of Ukraine.
Many in Ukraine saw the U.S. decision to enter Israel's war with Iran, even briefly, by striking three Iranian nuclear enrichment sites Sunday as a sign that the United States was walking away from the war in Ukraine.
The United States, once Ukraine's biggest supporter, has not announced any new military aid packages for the country in nearly five months -- since Trump took office. The military aid authorized under former President Joe Biden is expected to run out this summer. European allies have promised more help, and Ukraine is producing more of its own weapons, particularly drones. But those weapons are not enough to make up the gap, military experts say.
'America won't help us until we do something ourselves,' said Nataliia Babych, 37, who sells hot dogs in Kyiv and started crying when she talked about the missile and drone attack Monday. 'But we just don't have the strength right now.'
'People are dying every day,' she continued, 'both civilians and soldiers. I don't think America will help us at all, because now they're focused on Iran.'
For months, Ukrainians had hoped that Trump would pressure Russia to end the war, which Moscow started with its full-scale invasion in February 2022. But after months of fits and starts, peace talks have stalled.
Almost a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wanted the war to end. That deadline came and went.
One Ukrainian lawmaker, Oleksandr Merezhko, said he felt as if Trump was blaming Ukraine for the war that Russia started. Merezhko, who nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize in November largely because of the president's promise to end the conflict, decided to rescind that nomination Monday. He said Trump had engaged in double standards by attacking Iran.
'He's decisive in reacting against the authoritarian regime in Iran, but he doesn't do anything like that with regard to Putin,' Merezhko said. 'To me, it's not consistent.'
The contrast between last year's NATO summit in Washington and this week's in the Netherlands was striking.
Last year, the United States and its European allies agreed that Ukraine should have an 'irreversible' path to membership of the alliance. At this year's summit, there was no such guarantee, likely because Trump opposes it.
Mark Rutte, secretary-general of NATO, said in a news conference that the alliance continued to support Ukraine 'on its irreversible path to NATO membership.' But the official declaration only restated the alliance's 'enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours.'
Last year, Russian missiles killed at least 41 civilians in Ukraine the day before the summit began. Jens Stoltenberg, then NATO's secretary-general, explicitly condemned the 'horrendous missile attacks against Ukrainian cities, killing innocent civilians, including children.' The NATO-Ukraine Council, made up of heads of state and government, issued a statement that decried 'in the strongest possible terms Russia's horrific attacks on the Ukrainian people.'
This year, NATO allies did not collectively condemn Russia's missile attack in Dnipro on Tuesday, the first day of the summit. In addition to the 20 fatalities and 300 injured people, the attack damaged almost 50 apartment buildings, 40 educational institutions, eight medical facilities and one train.
Some countries, like France, did condemn the attack. On Monday, Rutte warned that Russia remains the alliance's biggest threat.
On Wednesday, at a news conference, Trump said 'it's possible' that Putin had ambitions beyond Ukraine. But he declined to call the Russian president an enemy. 'I consider him a person that's, I think, been misguided,' Trump said.
This year's summit ended with a commitment from most NATO allies to raise their military spending to 5% of their economic output over the next 10 years.
Danylo Yakovlev, 30, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, said that if Kyiv fell, the next targets would be countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and Poland. Europe needed to step up, he added.
'At the end of the day, we must rely first and foremost on ourselves,' Yakovlev said. 'We cannot assume anyone will come and save us. But at the same time, we need to make it absolutely clear to all other countries: If Ukraine falls, they could be next. And they may not even have a tomorrow.'
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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