Putin confirms he wants all of Ukraine, as Europe steps up military aid

Trump made no pledge of assis­tance to Ukraine at last week’s NATO sum­mit, but said he’d ‘try’ and sell it Patri­ot inter­cep­tors

Ukraine’s Euro­pean allies pledged increased lev­els of mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine this year, mak­ing up for a Unit­ed States aid freeze, as Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin reaf­firmed his ambi­tion to absorb all of Ukraine into the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion.

At this moment, the Euro­peans and the Cana­di­ans have pledged, for this year, $35bn in mil­i­tary sup­port to Ukraine,” said NATO Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Mark Rutte ahead of the alliance’s annu­al sum­mit, which took place in The Hague on Tues­day and Wednes­day, June 24–25.

“Last year, it was just over $50bn for the full year. Now, before we reach half year, it is already at $35bn. And there are even oth­ers say­ing it’s already close to $40bn,” he added

The increase in Euro­pean aid part­ly made up for the absence of any mil­i­tary aid offers so far from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion

In April, Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­skyy offered to buy the US Patri­ot air defence sys­tems Ukraine needs to fend off dai­ly mis­sile and drone attacks

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion made its first saleof weapons to Ukraine the fol­low­ing month, but only of F‑16 air­craft parts.

At The Hague this week, Zelen­skyy said he dis­cussed those Patri­ot sys­tems with Trump. At a news con­fer­ence on Wednes­day, Trump said: “We’re going to see if we can make some avail­able,” refer­ring to inter­cep­tors for exist­ing Patri­ot sys­tems in Ukraine. “They’re very hard to get. We need them too, and we’ve been sup­ply­ing them to Israel,” he said.

Rus­sia has made a cease­fire con­di­tion­al on Ukraine’s allies stop­ping the flow of weapons to it and Krem­lin spokesman Dmit­ry Peskov repeat­ed that con­di­tion on Sat­ur­day

On June 20, Vladimir Putin revealed that his ambi­tion to annex all of Ukraine had not abat­ed.

“I have said many times that the Russ­ian and Ukrain­ian peo­ple are one nation, in fact. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,” he declaredat a media con­fer­ence to mark the open­ing of the Saint Peters­burg Eco­nom­ic Forum on Fri­day, June 20.

“But you know we have an old para­ble, an old rule: wher­ev­er a Russ­ian sol­dier steps, it is ours.”

“Wher­ev­er a Russ­ian sol­dier steps, he brings only death, destruc­tion, and dev­as­ta­tion,” Ukrain­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Andrii Sybi­ha said the next day.

In a post on the Telegram mes­sag­ing plat­form on June 21, Zelen­skyy wrote that Putin had “spo­ken com­plete­ly open­ly”.

“Yes, he wants all of Ukraine,” he said. “He is also speak­ing about Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldo­va, the Cau­ca­sus, coun­tries like Kaza­khstan.”

Ger­man army plan­ners agreed about Putin’s expan­sion­ism, deem­ing Rus­sia an “exis­ten­tial threat” in a new strat­e­gy paper 18 months in the mak­ing, leaked to Der Spiegel news mag­a­zine last week

Moscow was prepar­ing its mil­i­tary lead­er­ship and defence indus­tries “specif­i­cal­ly to meet the require­ments for a large-scale con­flict against NATO by the end of this decade”, the paper said.

We in Ger­many ignored the warn­ings of our Baltic neigh­bours about Rus­sia for too long. We have recog­nised this mis­take,” said Ger­man chan­cel­lor Friedrich Merz on Tues­day, high­light­ing the rea­son for an about-turn from his two pre­de­ces­sors’ refusal to spend more on defence.

There is no going back from this real­i­sa­tion. We can­not expect the world around us to return to calmer times in the near future,” he added.