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For European leaders gathering in New York for the United Nations General Assembly this week, the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency and its “America First” politics has loomed large. On Thursday, their worst fears were confirmed.
In a lengthy press conference delivered in front of a sea of American flags in Trump Tower, the Republican presidential candidate said he planned to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday morning — and slammed Europe for being miserly when it comes to Ukraine.
“Europe is paying only a small fraction of the money the United States of America is paying, and we have an ocean between Russia and ourselves; they don’t,” said Trump, repeating a point he has made before, including during his election debate with Democrat Kamala Harris. “The United States is paying for most of it, and Europe is not chipping in … It’s very unfair on the United States.”
Moving to another favored talking point, Trump repeatedly described how he had demanded that NATO’s European allies contribute more to the alliance when he was U.S. president, implying that he would do the same when it comes to Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion.
“The European nations — they should be equalizing, they should be paying up. I did this with NATO. I made them all pay … I said if you don’t pay I’m not going to be there. And the money came pouring in.”
Zelenskyy, for his part, was finishing up a day of meetings in Washington, D.C., including with President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris and a bipartisan group of Congress members, as he seeks to shore up military and financial support for Ukraine ahead of the November election.
Biden announced more than $8 billion in military assistance for Kyiv ahead of Thursday’s meeting, and Harris said as she stood beside Zelenskyy that “Ukraine’s fight matters to the people of America.”
But Kyiv is concerned that U.S. commitments to Ukraine are waning as the war drags on, particularly among Republicans. Even if Harris wins the election, Congress still plays a crucial role in green-lighting money for Ukraine.
Trump used his press conference Thursday to restate his boast that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine if he had been still in the White House, and claim he would be able to secure peace.
Saying that he knows the Russian autocrat “very well,” Trump insisted: “I believe I will be able to make a deal between President Putin and President Zelenskyy quite quickly.”
Asked if this would include Ukraine ceding land to Russia, he replied: “We’ll see what happens … let’s get peace; we need peace.”
Trump’s latest comments come a day after he said at a campaign event in North Carolina that Ukraine should have “given up a little bit” to appease Moscow and avoid a bloody conflict with its invading neighbor, which he said “didn’t need to happen.”
Zelenskyy is on the back foot going into Friday’s meeting with Trump after Republicans chastised him for visiting an ammunition plant in Pennsylvania at the start of his U.S. trip, accompanied by Democratic politicians. In a letter to the Ukrainian president, House Speaker Mike Johnson decried the visit to the important electoral swing state as a political stunt, calling on Zelenskyy to fire his ambassador to the United States.
Trump’s warning to Europe to give more to Ukraine in his comments Thursday will do little to assuage concerns that a second Trump presidency would mark the return of policies that saw America rail against multilateral institutions like NATO and the United Nations.
Though European countries have significantly increased their military spending on Ukraine, and countries like Germany have dramatically upped their defense budgets, the United States is still the largest financial and military backer of Ukraine. Biden this week said he will host a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group with allies in Germany next month.
