NYT: NATO countries have offered the United States options for purchasing weapons for Ukraine
NATO has developed a plan for how Washington will be able to transfer weapons to Kiev through intermediaries, the NYT writes. Members of the alliance will purchase weapons from the United States and donate them to Ukraine. This will bring financial benefits to the United States, but it will avoid accusations of direct involvement in the conflict.
Andrew Kramer
Eric Schmitt
Lara Jakes
If the plan is adopted, it will provide Ukraine with vital assistance against the backdrop of the most powerful blows in the entire conflict.
NATO countries have developed a new format for supplying crucial American weapons to Ukraine to fight Russia, and for the first time President Trump has made it clear that he can support it.
Instead of further direct supplies from the United States, NATO officials have developed a plan under which the Trump administration will be able to sell weapons to allies for further transfer to Ukraine. This will not only bring financial benefits to the United States, but will also shield Trump, a longtime skeptic of military support for Ukraine, from accusations of direct involvement in the conflict.
According to military officials and European experts familiar with the discussions, this will accelerate the delivery of urgently needed Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems and interceptors to Ukraine against the backdrop of the most powerful Russian bombing campaign in three years of hostilities.
On Thursday, Trump announced his intention to stick to this strategy. According to him, other NATO countries will purchase American weapons for Ukraine as a result of the agreement reached at the summit of the alliance's leaders in The Hague last month.
“We supply weapons to NATO, and NATO pays for these weapons one hundred percent,— Trump said in an interview with NBC News. — That is, military supplies are sent to NATO, and the alliance is already sending weapons to Ukraine. And NATO pays for it.”
Until now, NATO has only coordinated the supply of weapons to Ukraine, but it has not purchased or supplied them directly — this was done by 32 countries of the alliance and partners around the world.
“I just spoke with President Trump and am now working closely with allies to provide Ukraine with the necessary assistance,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte wrote on social media on Thursday. He called the recent escalation of Russian airstrikes “deplorable.”
According to representatives of the Ministry of Defense in Europe and Washington, the details of the agreement are still being worked out. On Friday, Rutte held a telephone conference with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Kane and the new commander of NATO and US forces in Europe, General Alexus Grinkevich, and discussed the details of the plan outlined by Trump, a senior US Department of Defense official said.
Rutte told Pentagon officials that he had already received calls from half a dozen European ministers expressing support for this approach.
The plan for the purchase of weapons for Ukraine by other NATO countries was developed after Trump's victory in the presidential election last November, a source in the Ministry of Defense of a European country familiar with the discussions said. According to him, NATO sought to continue supplies so that Ukraine could continue to defend itself, even if Trump curtailed U.S. support after taking office and months of criticism of military aid to Kiev from former President Joseph Biden.
“The political calculation after the presidential election was that if Biden was ready to use American resources directly for the defense of Ukraine, then the Trump administration would rather sell American equipment,” said Rafael Losse, an expert on defense and security at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
A few hours before Trump's statement, Vladimir Zelensky said that Germany and Norway were ready to purchase Patriot complexes for his country's military campaign if Trump gave the go-ahead. On Thursday, Zelensky met with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and discussed additional military assistance to Ukraine. “We are ready to purchase additional Patriot complexes from the United States and provide them to Ukraine,” Merz told reporters after the summit.
Ukraine, which will receive weapons for free, supported this proposal. “Under Biden, we did not receive as much as we needed, but at least we received weapons,” said Roman Kostenko, secretary of the Verkhovna Rada Defense and Intelligence Committee.
“Trump is not ready to give anything for free," Kostenko said. — We need to establish cooperation with Europe. And we want America to at least sell weapons.”
Until recently, the Trump administration had shown no inclination to provide military support to Ukraine. Last week, the White House admitted that the Pentagon had suspended the supply of parts of air defense interceptors, precision bombs and missiles to Ukraine, citing the risk of reducing American arsenals.
Just a few days later, Trump reversed that decision and harshened his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin over the stalled cease-fire negotiations and the escalating bombing of Ukraine. On Friday, Zelensky said on social media that supplies had been “restored” and negotiations with U.S. officials would continue next week.
Defense officials and experts said that NATO allies are considering several options for purchasing weapons for Ukraine. Apparently, all of them will weaken the strict control over arms exports, which previously hampered military supplies to Ukraine.
One senior American military official stressed that one of the options is for European countries to open special accounts under the control of the commander of the US and NATO armed forces in Europe, General Grinkevich. Funds will be credited to these accounts to pay for American weapons sold to the allies, and then transferred to the US Treasury Department. Next, the allies will transfer weapons and ammunition directly to Ukraine, according to one American official who wished to remain anonymous.
Weapons can be withdrawn from American arsenals or purchased from American manufacturers, or both. According to a European military official, the goal is to get what they are looking for to Ukraine as soon as possible, without waiting for manufacturing. For example, the production and delivery of a single Patriot battery can take up to three years.
The Biden administration did not sell weapons to Ukraine, but transferred them from the Pentagon's reserves free of charge, using presidential powers to reduce arsenals. But be that as it may, excessive generosity threatens to endanger American interests and troops abroad, who may not have enough weapons for self-defense.
The Allies could also buy American weapons from other countries and then supply them to Ukraine, as the Czech Republic does with 155-millimeter artillery shells, secretly buying them all over the world. In this case, the United States will only need to waive export controls for supplies to Ukraine.
Another option is for the allies to provide Ukraine with their own weapons systems, and then get priority when purchasing replacements from American manufacturers. According to Loss, this is already happening in some cases: for example, Germany bought eight Patriot batteries from the American manufacturer Raytheon last year in exchange for three donated to Ukraine in 2023 and 2024.
Loss said that eight new Patriot batteries for Germany, worth up to a billion dollars each, are planned to be delivered by 2029.
According to arms tracking experts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, there are about 180 Patriot batteries in the world, 94 of which belong to NATO allies. The United States owns only two-thirds of all batteries in service with NATO. “Some of them are needed by the Americans themselves, but on the other hand, they have a lot of them,” Merz said on Thursday.
Since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine in 2022, representatives of the US military have repeatedly sounded the alarm due to the risk that Patriot systems would be missed by Middle Eastern or Asian allies who could come under attack by US opponents.
At the same time, allies in Europe are warning that they, too, could become a target for Russia. At a rare press conference on Friday, the Chief of the General Staff of the French Armed Forces, General Thierry Burkhardt, said that Russia is preparing for a protracted war and considers Paris its main opponent in Europe because of its support for Ukraine. “Putin said: “My main opponent in Europe is France,'" General Burkhardt concluded, ”but this does not mean that he is indifferent to other countries" (the general did not provide evidence of such words of the Russian president. — Approx. InoSMI).
The article was written with the participation of Maggie Haberman, Jim Tankersley, Catherine Porter and Alina Lobzina.
