In less than 72 hours, the nature of the transatlantic relationship changed. And, in all likelihood, the Ukrainians lost the war. On 12 February US defence secretary Pete Hegseth initiated peace negotiations on Ukraine. Up front, he acceded to Moscow’s two main demands: Kyiv would not join NATO, and ‘new territorial realities’ would be recognised – that is, Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions and Crimea.

The next day, after a lengthy phone call with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump announced he intended to meet the Russian leader in Saudi Arabia – without Ukrainians or Europeans present – and said he wanted elections to be held in Ukraine soon. Then, on 14 February, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, US vice-president JD Vance avoided any mention of Ukraine. Instead, he lambasted European leaders for betraying the aspirations of their own people by restricting freedom of expression on social media and annulling elections in Romania due to alleged Russian interference.

In the run-up to all this, Trump had unleashed a trade war, imposing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico and the EU, and even staking a claim to Greenland. But now, his strategy has gone beyond simply pressuring his allies to buy more US arms and rebalance trade deficits. By declaring that the US will not provide security guarantees to Ukraine, or for any European troops deployed there to enforce a potential ceasefire, Trump has inevitably raised doubts about whether the US would stand by its NATO allies in the event of an attack. Without the security commitment that underpins it, the transatlantic relationship is starting to look like nothing so much as one-sided dependence.

And yet, since 2022, the US has ‘invested’ an average of $35.3bn a year in Ukraine – far more than the $3-5bn Washington allocated annually to Israel before 7 October 2023, and almost half as much as its annual military budget for Afghanistan between 2001 and 2019, a level of (…)

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(2) ‘Ukraine support tracker’, Kiel Institute for the World, 2024.

(5) See Hélène Richard, ‘Growing doubt in Ukraine’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, November 2023.