Europeans reacted with relief to the announcement on Tuesday that Ukraine had agreed with the United States on a 30-day cease-fire in its war with Russia and anxiously awaited Moscow’s response. They were relieved because Washington announced simultaneously that it would immediately restore military and intelligence support for Ukraine. And there was expectation that Russia…
As recently as January, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia emphatically rejected the idea of a temporary cease-fire in Ukraine. But after a month in which President Trump turned American foreign policy on its head and Russian forces made progress in a key battle, the Kremlin now appears keen at least to entertain the 30-day…
Italian employees at the Aviano Air Base in northern Italy paused from flipping burgers, unloading trucks and restocking shelves recently to open an email from their bosses demanding that they list five key accomplishments from last week. The email was a by-now familiar demand from President Trump’s chief cost-cutter, Elon Musk, carrying with it the…
With anger in Europe mounting over President Trump’s perceived abandonment of the continent, President Emmanuel Macron of France gathered the chiefs of staff of more than 30 armed forces on Tuesday to review the formation of a multinational peacekeeping force to monitor any cease-fire in Ukraine. The countries represented at the meeting, convened in partnership…
For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains. Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and…
Warning that a “profound change of American geopolitics” had put Poland, as well as Ukraine, in an “objectively more difficult situation,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland on Friday said his country must drastically increase the size of its military and even “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” Mr. Tusk, in a detailed speech…
President Trump has never had much love for the NATO alliance, which he thinks is overdependent on American largess, and in his first term, talked about abandoning the collective defense pact. In his second term, Mr. Trump and his senior officials have made it clear that the security of Europe is no longer the first…
On the battlefields of Ukraine and western Russia, a stalemated war has ground on, with Ukrainian troops defending against Russian progress that can be measured sometimes in mere yards. The cost has been heavy casualties on both sides. President Trump’s decision this week to pause military assistance and intelligence sharing could reorder the battlefield, either…
Britain and France have promised to muster a “coalition of the willing” to secure a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Now comes the acid test for Europe: How many countries will step up, and does that even matter, given Russia’s rejection of such a coalition as part of any settlement? Prime Minister Keir Starmer…
The Finnish authorities said on Sunday that they had released an oil tanker seized in December over suspicions that it had deliberately cut vital undersea cables but that a criminal investigation into the episode would continue. The authorities said last year that the ship, the Eagle S, appeared to belong to Russia’s shadow fleet —…