President Trump’s new plan to send U.S. weapons to Ukraine and his simultaneous threat to impose harsh penalties on Russia’s trading partners reflect a dramatic shift in his position on the war, but leave key details unclear.
Speaking alongside NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, at the White House on Monday, Mr. Trump said that Patriot air defense systems and other arms would “quickly” be transferred to Ukraine, which is in desperate need of more weapons to fend off Russia’s invasion.
Mr. Trump said the United States would sell those arms to European nations, which would ship them to Ukraine or use them to replace weapons they send to the country from their existing stocks.
But Pentagon officials said later that many details were still being worked out.
And experts doubted the credibility of Mr. Trump’s threat to impose 100 percent tariffs on Russia’s trading partners if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did not agree to a cease-fire within 50 days.
The scale of China’s mutual trade with Russia — nearly $250 billion per year, including huge oil imports — means that delivering on the threat would throw Mr. Trump into a showdown with Beijing. Analysts said it was unlikely that Mr. Trump would risk a renewed confrontation with the world’s second-largest economy over Ukraine, a country whose fate he has long said is not vital to the United States.
Mr. Trump is also notorious for setting deadlines that he does not enforce, raising questions about whether he will act if the 50-day timer he has set for Mr. Putin expires.
Mr. Trump’s words were welcome in Ukraine and by its supporters in Washington, who feared just a few months ago that the U.S. president was prepared to abandon the country’s defense against Russia. But after years of courting Mr. Putin as an ally, Mr. Trump has come to see the Russian leader as the main obstacle to fulfilling his promises of swiftly ending the war.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, praised Mr. Trump’s shift: “Today’s decision to send additional Patriot batteries to Ukraine, made possible through the meaningful investments of our European partners, will save countless Ukrainian lives from Putin’s horrific assault.”
The approach, which NATO leaders conceived and Mr. Trump approved last week, illustrates the way Mr. Rutte and his colleagues have cracked the Trump code and found a way to work productively with the U.S. president. During his first term, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized NATO and even mused about a U.S. withdrawal from the military alliance.
“I have to tell you, Europe has a lot of spirit for this war,” Mr. Trump said on Monday. “When I first got involved, I really didn’t think they did, but they do.”
The plan also suggests that a concerted European effort to shift Mr. Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has gained traction. Mr. Trump berated the Ukrainian leader as insolent and ungrateful during a televised Oval Office meeting in February, but has since repaired his relationship with Mr. Zelensky.
Mr. Trump was pleased by Ukraine’s acceptance in April of a deal to share its mineral wealth with the United States. And by Monday he was speaking of the “tremendous courage” of Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Like the minerals deal, the plan Mr. Trump announced on Monday plays to his transactional nature and promises a windfall for the United States from Europe’s purchase of American weapons. It also shields a president who long questioned the Biden administration’s many transfers of arms and money to Ukraine from charges that he is changing course and throwing more money at the war.
Russian state media quickly sought to promote the idea of Mr. Trump’s political jeopardy: “If Trump Folds to Neocons on Ukraine, MAGA Base Will Bury Him as Biden 2.0,” read one headline in the Kremlin-funded website Sputnik.
But much depends on what Mr. Trump’s words really mean.
“Billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment is going to be purchased from the United States,” Mr. Trump said on Monday. “That’s going to be quickly distributed to the battlefield.” Some of the new aid could begin arriving within “days,” he added.
The deliveries to Ukraine would include additional U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems, Mr. Trump said. Ukraine already has some Patriots but has pleaded for more.
Mr. Trump said there were “a couple of countries” with Patriot systems that would give them to Ukraine and then buy replacements from the United States. But he did not identify those countries. Last week, Mr. Zelensky said both Germany and Norway were prepared to buy Patriots for the war effort if Mr. Trump approved.
Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates a restrained military policy abroad, said Mr. Putin had rebuffed U.S. peace overtures because “he is not ready to stop fighting.”
“He assesses, rightly in my view, that Russia has the battlefield advantage and that there is not much that the United States or Europe can do to pressure him or impose meaningful costs,” she said. “More aid to Ukraine is unlikely to shift the military balance in a major way, and Putin is prepared to weather the costs of additional sanctions.”
Ms. Kavanagh, who believes that a U.S. strategy of indefinitely arming Ukraine is “not sustainable,” added that the size of existing weapons stockpiles in Europe and the United States limits what can be sent to Ukraine in the near future. Europe, whose defense industrial base is much smaller than America’s, can order new weapons, but those deliveries may not arrive for months or years.
Much was also unclear about Mr. Trump’s economic threats, including how plausible they are.
While Mr. Trump declared he was ready to impose 100 percent tariffs on both Russia and its trading partners after 50 days without a cease-fire deal, direct tariffs on U.S. imports to Russia would have no meaningful effect on Russia’s economy.
The United States imported only about $3 billion in Russian goods in 2024, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Most of that consists of Russian exports to America that have been deemed essential, including fertilizer, iron, steel and uranium for U.S. nuclear reactors. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump intends to limit that commerce. (The United States in turn only exports a paltry $500 million in goods to Russia.)
Mr. Trump’s threat to impose “secondary” tariffs on any country that trades with Russia could have far more impact, particularly when it comes to Russia’s energy sector. The Russian economy has weathered punishing sanctions largely thanks to its continued oil and gas exports to nations that are not part of the Western-led sanctions regime.
China and India in particular are particular lifelines, having taken advantage of the lower energy prices Russia can command since losing its Western buyers after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Both countries pour the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars annually into Kremlin coffers.
India may have room to cut back: While it now imports nearly 40 percent of its oil from Russia, before 2022, that figure was just 1 percent. But Russia is a major trading partner for China, and even before 2022 accounted for more than 15 percent of China’s oil imports.
Edward Fishman, a former State Department official and an expert on Russia sanctions, noted that Mr. Trump had already backed down once from threatened tariffs of more than 125 percent on Chinese exports.
“If the goal here is to reduce Russia’s energy exports, it won’t work,” he wrote on social media.
Many close U.S. allies, including Japan and the European Union, also do substantial business with Russia.
Mr. Trump also knows that sharply reduced Russian energy exports would drive up global oil prices, hitting American consumers at the gas pump, shaking markets and spurring general inflation.
Mr. Trump’s promise of additional aid comes amid a drawn-out, slow-moving Russian ground offensive in eastern Ukraine and nightly bombardments by Russian drones and missiles throughout the country. Both the long-range strikes and the trench fighting has grown bloodier this year, even as cease-fire talks began, according to United Nations tallies of civilian deaths and analysts’ estimates of military casualties.
In its most recent advances, the Russian army, in vicious fighting in ravines and oak forests, pushed six miles into Ukraine in the northeastern Sumy region before largely stalling. Russia has also tightened partial encirclements of two cities, Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka, in eastern Ukraine in recent months.
Russia has increased the volume of exploding drones and decoys it launches daily this year, creating a dire need in Ukraine for interceptor drones, shoulder-fired missiles such as Stingers and air-to-air missiles for F-16 fighter jets to down drones.
The Patriots are reserved for fast-flying Russian ballistic missiles and are the only defense against one Russian model regularly fired at Kyiv and other targets.
While Ms. Kavanagh does not expect Mr. Trump’s ultimatum to change Mr. Putin’s calculus, she said that Mr. Trump’s 50-day deadline will coincide with the arrival of fall and the end of Russia’s summer offensive.
“I do think that there could be a window for negotiations after” the offensive ends, she said.
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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