By Tetyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff
A week is a long time in politics, and with Donald Trump in the White House, it's even longer in international affairs. It has been eight days since the infamous shouting match on February 28 between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Ever since, the near-total breakdown in the relationship between the US and Ukraine and the almost irreparable damage in the transatlantic relationship has become more of a certainty.
Zelensky, urged by European leaders, including the British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, has tried to mend his ties with Trump. The US president acknowledged as much in his first post-inauguration speech to congress on March 5 saying that he appreciated Zelensky’s readiness to work for peace under US leadership.
But that happened just 24 hours after he decided to halt all military aid to Ukraine. And since then, the new director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, and Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, have confirmed that intelligence sharing with Kyiv, which was critical to Ukraine’s ability to hit strategic targets inside Russia, has also been suspended.
Neither of these two moves have an immediate game-changing effect on the war, but they will certainly increase pressure on Ukraine to accept whatever deal Trump will ultimately make with Putin.
Trump's manoeuvring does not only affect Ukraine, it has also had a profound impact on Europe.
So far, so bad. Yet Trump's manoeuvring does not only affect Ukraine, it has also had a profound impact on the rest of Europe. On Sunday (March 2), in the immediate aftermath of the debacle in the White House, Starmer convened an emergency meeting in London.
Much like the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had invited key European leaders after the insults delivered by the US vice president, JD Vance, at the Munich Security Conference earlier in February, Starmer hosted a select number of European leaders, as well as the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau. This "coalition of the willing" has been in the making for some time now and straddles the boundaries of the EU and Nato, including — apart from the UK — also non-EU members Norway and Turkey.
Since the relatively disappointing first ever EU meeting solely focused on defence on February 3 — which was most notable for the absence of a European vision for the continent's role and place in a Trumpian world order — Europe has embarked on a course of more than just rhetorical change.
The UK was first out of the tracks, announcing an increase of defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 on February 25, ahead of Starmer's visit to Washington. The British government then followed this up with a pledge of additional air defence missiles for Ukraine worth £1.6 billion on March 2. On March 6, Britain transferred £752 million — the first third of a £2.26 billion loan backed by profits from frozen Russian assets — to Ukraine for the purchase of military equipment.
In a crucial boost to defence spending at the EU level, the president of the European commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the "ReArm Europe Plan" on March 4 which is projected to mobilise around €800 billion for European defence. This includes a "national escape clause" exempting EU members' national defence expenditures from the EU's deficit rules, a new loan instrument worth up to €150 billion, the use of already allocated funds in the EU budget for defence projects, and partnerships with the private sector through the Savings and Investment Union and the European Investment Bank.
And perhaps most significantly, in Germany, the two main parties likely to form the next coalition government, on March 5 confirmed a major shift in the country's fiscal policy that will allow any defence spending above 1% of GDP to be financed outside the country's strict borrowing rules. This marks a critical point of departure for Germany not just in fiscal terms. It also sends an important political signal that Germany — the continent's largest economy — will use its financial and political muscle to strengthen the emerging coalition of the willing.
These are all important steps. Provided that the current momentum is maintained, they are cumulatively likely to accelerate a European awakening. The challenges that Europe faces on the way to become strategically independent from the US are enormous, but they are not insurmountable.
The conventional military threat posed by a revanchist and revisionist Russia is more easily manageable with the kinds of plans currently in the making. They are aimed to boost, among others, conventional forces, long-range missile strike and drone capabilities, and air and cyber defences. Close cooperation with Ukraine will add critical war-fighting experience which can further enhance the deterrent effect of a European coalition of the willing.
Europe, however, remains vulnerable in terms of its nuclear capabilities.
Europe, however, remains vulnerable in terms of its nuclear capabilities, especially if deprived of the US nuclear umbrella and faced with potential nuclear blackmail by Russia, the world's largest nuclear power by warhead stockpiles. But here, too, new strategic thinking is emerging.
President Macron of France has indicated his willingness to discuss a more integrated European nuclear posture.
In Germany, a country with an otherwise very complex relationship with nuclear weapons, such a European approach has been debated, increasingly positively, for some time, starting during Trump's first term in office between 2017 and 2021.
And Poland, already one of the largest defence spenders in Nato by share of GDP, has announced plans to build an army of half-a-million men and “pursue the most advanced capabilities, including nuclear and modern unconventional weapons.”
A stronger and strategically more independent Europe, even if it will take some time to emerge, is also crucial for the war in Ukraine. Increased European defence spending will help Kyiv in the short term to make up for at least some of the gaps left by the suspension, and possibly complete cut, of US military support. In the long term, Ukraine’s EU accession could open up the route to a security guarantee for Ukraine under Article 47.2 of the Lisbon Treaty on European Union.
This so-called mutual defence clause has often been derided in the past because of the lack of any meaningful European defence capabilities. But if the current European momentum towards beefing up the continent's defences is sustained, it would acquire more teeth than it currently has.
However, this is not a foregone conclusion. The fact that Hungary did not support the March 6 European Council conclusions on Ukraine is an indication of the deep rift inside the Union. It appears to be contained for now, and Hungary did sign up to the Council conclusions on defence.
Only Hungary seems to delude itself that European defence can be separated from the defence of Ukraine.
With the benefit of hindsight, President Zelensky may have walked away less empty-handed from his clash with President Trump last week than it seemed initially. If nothing else, Europeans have since then demonstrated not just in words but also in deeds that they are no longer in denial about just how dangerous Trump is and how much they are now on their own. Only Hungary seems to delude itself that European defence can be separated from the defence of Ukraine. By contrast, countries from Ireland to Türkiye finally seem to have woken up to the threat of a United States that now votes with Russia and North Korea in the UN General Assembly — and they are starting to act accordingly.
Threatened by both Moscow and Washington, Europe is now on the cusp of a second Zeitenwende, the "epochal tectonic shift" then-German chancellor Olaf Scholz acknowledged after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Europeans may finally even have found an answer to the question he posed at the time: “How can we, as Europeans and as the European Union, remain independent actors in an increasingly multi-polar world?”
An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on March 6, 2025.
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