US President Donald Trump announced that the US is withdrawing from supplying free military equipment to the Ukraine and from now on any weapons will be “100%” paid for by Kyiv’s European Nato allies.

"We will send these weapons to Nato, and Nato will pay us for them, 100%," Donald Trump himself confirmed in an interview with NBC. "We will supply them with Patriot missiles, and then Nato will distribute them." The big unanswered question is when these supplies will arrive? Do they come from the US stockpile, which as The Guardian reported on June 2 is currently 25% of what is needed, or will they be ordered from manufacturers? Currently, Raytheon, which makes the Patriots, has about a four-year backlog of orders.

However, the day before, it was reported Trump had decided for the first time to allocate new ammunition from American reserves to Ukraine. According to Reuters, the weapons in question are worth $300mn and could include Patriot missiles and medium-range ballistic missiles. Considerable uncertainty continues to surround what the mercurial Trump will do.

At conferences in London and Rome last week these allies were reduced to making gestures in its support of Ukraine’s existential fight against Russia, as Europe has neither the money nor the production capacity to replace US military output.

Trump said the deal was cut at the Nato summit in The Hague. It takes the US out of the game completely, although he also said that he has a “big announcement” to make on July 14 that might include more aid to Kyiv, or sanctions on Russia. Trump’s attitude has noticeable soured in recent weeks, culminating last week in his most pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia comments since he took office.

But the US has now been basically reduced to storekeeper, selling weapons to those that can pay. It has abrogated its moral leadership as the bastion of the free world and democracy.

You could see this coming. Trump made it clear from the start he didn’t want to have anything to do with Ukraine after the ceasefire talks collapsed following the second Istanbul meeting on June 3. At the Nato summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy gave Trump a long-wish list of weapons Kyiv needs, starting with a lot more Patriot air defence ammo, which Trump said he was “looking at”  He has sent a mere ten Patriot interceptor rockets in the meantime – not enough to protect Ukraine for even one day. Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports that since the missile war started in May, missile and drone attacks have soared from 120 a day to 750. Zelenskiy said that Russia fired 18 missiles on July 9 alone. Ten interceptors can bring down about five of those.

“26 cruise missiles and 597 drones in one night. Russia is waging a war of terror against the Ukrainian people, against civilians. Pure evil. It can be stopped only with pressure: stronger air defence, more weapons, tougher sanctions,” Oksana Markarova, Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of Ukraine to the USA, said in a post on social media on July 13. 

Between January 1 and July 12, the number of Russia's nightly missile and drone attacks on Ukraine has gone from 120 to 750 – Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Nuclear deterrent

The headline news from last week UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed in London to join forces and provide a nuclear deterrent by uniting their nuclear arsenal, as the US snaps its decades-old security umbrella shut.

The trouble is that collectively, the UK and France have a total of approximately 225 and 290 nuclear warheads respectively, against Russia’s 5,459 as of early 2025. This includes land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers.

While it would only take a handful of European missiles to get through Russia’s air defences to cause massive damage to the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR), Russia’s retaliation would certainly destroy all of Western Europe.

And given Trump’s dithering on America’s Nato commitments, it is not clear that the US would retaliate. The text of Nato’s Article 5 collective security agreement does not make a military response to an attack on one Nato member automatic by the other members.

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs.. [will take] such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area,” the text says. A nuclear counterstrike is an option, not an imperative. Article 5 has been invoked only once – after the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

Nato set up the so-called “missile shield” in May 2001, nominally to protect Europe from “rogue states” such as North Korea but clearly to actually defend the EU’s eastern border against a Russian missile attack. It is largely composed of the land-based SM‑3 interceptor missiles stationed in Romania and Poland at the Aegis Ashore sites. However, these two bases contain a total of only 48 interceptor missiles and would be immediately overwhelmed by a full-scale Russian attack. Moreover, the SM-3 are designed to counter medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), not Russia’s nuclear ICBMs.

In addition, there are Patriot systems deployed in countries like Germany, Poland and Romania. But again, these are only effective against short-range and cruise missiles, not strategic nuclear ICBMs. Europe has around 500 nuclear warheads, but it doesn’t have any ICBMs and only eight nuclear armed submarines, which still could inflict significant damage on Russia, despite the thousands of air defence missiles the latter maintains.

Starmer says that the UK has ordered the advance F-34 fighters from the US that can deliver nuclear bombs into the Russian heartland, but these won’t arrive until the end of this decade.

“The UK is buying US F-35A jets to carry B61 tactical nuclear bombs. They won’t arrive until the end of the decade. But the decision signals that Europe is planning for a limited nuclear response if needed,” says Tymofiy Mylovanov, rector of the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) and former economics minister. "Putin has threatened nuclear strikes since 2022. He may now believe a limited strike could crush Ukraine’s resistance and break the West’s reaction."

The bottom line is Europe cannot counter or defend itself from a large-scale Russian nuclear missile attack. Its defences are token, and the Starmer-Macron joint UK-France nuclear coordination is yet another gesture. In all the scenarios of a Russian attack, Europe’s defences could at best bring down a handful of missiles; most of them would get through. Europe’s nuclear deterrent remains entirely dependent on the US nuclear security umbrella.

Russian missile attack on Europe scenarios
Scenario	Interception chance	EU self-defence	Likely outcome
Tactical strike (1-3 warheads)	Low–moderate	Limited Patriots	Retaliation, high escalation risk
Regional strike (20-50 warheads)	Very low	Overwhelmed	NATO nuclear retaliation
Full-scale strike (hundreds)	Zero	No defence	Mutual destruction on both sides
source: bne IntelliNews

European aid

Underfunded and lacking defence sector production capacity, Europe has been reduced to making gestures of support, which sound good, but add little materially to Ukraine’s defence as the Russian attacks intensify.

As a leading member of the coalition of the willing, Germany says it will send two Patriot batteries it has on order, and Norway has added a third. But these systems won’t be available under next year.

One of the things that Russia is targeting with its high precision missiles in the last month is Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) air defence installations, so the air defences are probably being degraded even faster than just by burning through ammo in defence.

Germany-funded long-range weapons to arrive in Ukraine by late July, general says. German Major General Christian Freuding confirmed that the weapons systems' initial deliveries are expected by the end of July. The arms will be supplied in a "high triple-digit quantity," he said. But despite the “never give up” rhetoric, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is still refusing to send Ukraine Germany’s powerful Taurus missiles, which would be a game-changer.

However, Freuding was vague about the timing of when Ukraine might see the results of cooperation between the countries on providing Ukraine with new interceptor drones that are designed to counter Russia growing fleet of attack drones. Freuding said they will try to implement it as “soon as possible.”

Likewise, it came out this week that the UK-French-made equivalent, the Storm Shadow (SCALP), the newest one in stock, was made 15 years ago and is not even in production anymore. Production is now set to resume later this year.

And Europe doesn’t have some of the essential battlefield equipment that is currently supplied by the US. In particular, it lacks the real-time satellite intelligence that is essential for Ukrainian military operations. That was shut down temporarily earlier this month, effectively leaving the AFU blind to Russian troop movements, until it was reported as part of Trump’s recent reversal.

Currently the EU’s defence sector is on its back and the global defence laggard, Statista reports. The only country actually doing anything significant is Poland, which has just announced $665mn of investment into the production of 1mn 155mm shells a year – a proper investment – but that too won’t appear for a few years. Ukraine needs help now.

Russian missiles attacks are intensifying and increasingly hitting targets in western Ukraine , which has been largely ignored until recently.