After being distracted by the Iran war and cutting off Ukraine’s financial and military aid, US President Donald Trump is back in the Ukraine peace game. In a major policy U-turn, the Trump administration has promised to give Kyiv a licence to make its own desperately needed Patriot missile weapons to fend off Russia’s relentless missile attacks that are destroying the country, Trump said during a press conference at the Ankara Nato summit on July 8.

Trump also did an about face on a mooted drone deal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy offered Washington a $50bn mega drones-for-weapons deal last year but was rebuffed by Trump who dismissively said “We don’t need any help” at the time. However, after being pounded by Iran’s drones in the first month of the Gulf war it seems that the White House has woken up to Kyiv’s prowess at drone warfare. Now Trump says he wants to buy Ukrainian-made drones, signalling a clear shift in his administration's approach as the US becomes actively involved again in trying to revive peace negotiations with Russia that collapsed in March.

Trump made the twin announcements sitting alongside Zelenskiy at the Nato summit, in what has been described as their “warmest” meeting to date and stands in stark contrast to Trump's confrontational Oval Office meeting with the president of Ukraine last February, when he famously told the Ukrainian leader that he had "no cards". This time round, Trump repeatedly praised Ukraine's technological innovation, described its drone industry as "an amazing ability" and suggested Kyiv had become a defence-industrial “partner” rather than simply an impoverished cousin looking for handouts.

Patriot production

The headline announcement came when Trump confirmed that the US was considering allowing Ukraine to manufacture Patriot interceptors itself, addressing one of Kyiv's most pressing military problems as Russian missile and drone attacks intensify.

Much has been made of Ukraine’s rapid development of drones, but in the drones vs missiles arms race, Russia still has the overwhelming advantage. Ukraine has repeatedly warned that supplies of Patriot interceptor missiles are critically constrained, while US production capacity remains constrained and after the Iran war the backlog in orders has stretched into years. With winter looming, it is widely assumed that Russian President Vladimir Putin will again use his advantage in missile production to try and freeze Ukraine into submission by repeating last winter’s missile attacks on what remains of Ukraine’s power sector. Pre-war Ukraine had just under 60GW of generating capacity. Now it has 10GW left and some regions have already been forced to introduce rolling blackouts during this summer’s heatwave. Kyiv’s skies are open again forcing thousands of residents to shelter in the metro system each night.

"We're going to give a licence to you to make Patriots," Trump said. "Make them yourself."

Trump said Washington would work with the manufacturer to transfer production know-how, adding that Ukrainian engineers possessed the expertise to master the complex system quickly.

"Most countries couldn't do that," Trump said. "This is a very ingenious group."

Calling Patriot "the best" air-defence system in the world, Trump stressed that he preferred defensive weapons to offensive ones but acknowledged the US itself had limited stocks.

"We have Patriots, but we don't have that many. We need them for ourselves too," he said.

If implemented, licensed production would represent one of the most significant transfers of advanced US military technology to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion.

From weapons aid to industrial partnership

Trump also confirmed that Washington wants to purchase Ukrainian drones in another major volte-face. He embraced an idea Zelenskiy floated last year when he proposed a large-scale drones-for-weapons industrial partnership that the White House showed little interest in pursuing.

"We would buy their drones," Trump said. "They have an ability to make a lot of them... It's an amazing ability. In a war situation, they make them in basements. They make them wherever the hell you have a little shelter."

The remarks reflected growing recognition in Washington that Ukraine has become one of the world's leading innovators in low-cost military drone production after more than four years of war in the asymmetrical war that has now become the norm since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Rather than simply supplying weapons to Ukraine, in contrast to the Biden administration, the Trump administration has launched a new direction where it is willing to exchange technology with Kyiv, licensing advanced American air-defence systems while seeking to acquire Ukrainian expertise in mass-produced unmanned systems. This is a significant promotion for Kyiv in its foreign relations standing with the White House.

Putin wants peace

Underlying his changes is an apparent change in attitude by the Trump administration in its assessment of Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia. Following Trump’s tête-à-tête with Putin at the Alaska summit last August, Trump aggressively promoted Putin’s demands culminating in his “final offer” proposal at a London summit. Trump demanded Zelenskiy accept most of Putin’s demands, which Zelenskiy refused in his counteroffer that started with a call for an unconditional ceasefire before talks could begin. Eventually negotiations started in Riyadh last February, brokered by the US, but went nowhere. That process culminated in the Moscow meeting on December 3 where a 27-point peace plan (27PPP) was thrashed out that Putin said was “almost acceptable.” In parallel, it emerged that Trump had brokered the so-called Dmitriev package of business deals with Russia worth a reported $12 trillion – around five-times more valuable than the entire Russian economy.

Trump seems to have abandoned this mercantile approach to the Ukraine war entirely and is now offering real long-term support to Bankova to keep it in the war as Putin comes under increasing pressure thanks to Ukraine's more aggressive drone attacks on Russian oil refineries. Trump also struck a markedly more optimistic tone on diplomacy than in previous months, insisting that both Vladimir Putin and Zelenskiy now wanted to end the conflict. He spoke to both presidents by phone on the eve of the Nato summit.

"I think he wants to make a deal," Trump said of the Russian president. "I know when people want to make a deal... I think he wants to make a deal."

Asked why he believed Putin was serious, Trump replied simply: "Because I talk to him."

He also acknowledged that Moscow was under increasing strain.

"There's a lot of pressure on President Putin to get it done," Trump said. "I don't think he likes what's going on."

As IntelliNews reported, tensions in the Kremlin are rising between the Kremlin’s doves and the hawks, who both want the conflict to end as the economy comes under increasing pressure, but can’t agree on how to end it: the doves want to declare victory now and stop; the hawks want to call a general mobilisation in the autumn, flood Ukraine with soldiers and rapidly capture the rest of the Donbas.

Trump nevertheless cautioned that wars often become most dangerous immediately before negotiations begin.

"Sometimes you have two kids in a park and they don't like each other and they start fighting," he said. "Sometimes you have to let them fight."

He estimated that around 25,000 Russian soldiers died last month and 35,000 the month before, "more Russians", describing the conflict as "brutal".

Reality on the battlefield

Trump's optimism came against a complex military backdrop. In the run up to the Nato summit, Ukraine’s backers have been guilty of threat escalation, suggesting that Russia is getting ready to attack Poland and the Baltics. At the same time they hype the slowdown of Russia’s advances and have talked of the conflict reaching a “turning point”.

The reality on the battlefield paints a different picture. Russian forces appear close to consolidating control over Kostiantynivka, one of the three key towns in Ukraine's Donbas "fortress belt" and an important step towards Putin’s stated war goal of capturing the remainder of the Donetsk region. Ukrainian troops are reported still to hold isolated positions inside the city, but several analysts believe Russia has effectively established control over most of the urban area while preparing to push towards Druzhkivka, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk – the last holdouts in the fortress belt.

Journalist and military analyst Leonid Ragozin argues that the apparent capture of Kostiantynivka demonstrates that Russia continues to make "slow but steady" territorial gains despite Ukraine's increasingly successful long-range strike campaign against Russian refineries and logistics. Mark Galeotti, the CEO of Mayak Intelligence, argues that this is why Putin remains on the fence between the doves and the hawks as the military situation could still swing either way.

Most tellingly, former Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi cautioned against drawing simplistic conclusions from either side's battlefield successes and not to assume that Russia has lost the war.

"Modern warfare no longer rewards tactical victories in the way it once did," he wrote this week in an op-ed for the Telegraph. The war, he argued, had become one of "mutual denial rather than decisive victory", with success increasingly determined by industrial production, logistics, drone warfare and societal resilience rather than movements of the front line.

Zaluzhnyi has bucked the trend and undermined Bankova’s rhetoric before when he gave a controversial interview to the western press saying that the war had reached a stalemate after the AFU’s failed summer offensive in 2023. Those comments brought down a storm of protest and denials from Bankova and led to a personal clash between the president and the highly popular general. Zelenskiy later sacked Zaluzhnyi, who is now his main political rival and likely to defeat Zelenskiy in mooted elections this autumn. As it turned out, Zaluzhnyi was right about the war being stalemated.

Instead of being close to a Russian collapse, Trump seems to think that the war is in another stalemate. Questioned about Ukraine's increasingly effective strikes deep inside Russia, Trump acknowledged that "Russians are finding it more difficult to defend their own airspace", while Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that the campaign had "changed the dynamics" of the conflict and could help create conditions for negotiations. European leaders are almost universally spinning Ukraine’s position as being one of strength and calling for an “increase in pressure” on Russia to bring Putin to the negotiating table and offer better terms.

Zelenskiy arrived in Ankara visibly a lot more confident than he had been for much of the last four years and argued that Ukraine had seized the technological initiative.

"We are trying to move this war to the sky from the battlefield," he said. "We found another way... to cut their logistics for their army," he said of the highly successful campaign to use Ukraine’s new medium-range drones to attack Russia’s supply lines behind the frontlines.

Security guarantees

The Trump administration seems to have abandoned the 27PPP as a formula to end the conflict and is going back to basics if ceasefire talks resume this summer. The biggest obstacle to any settlement remains coming up with a real security deal. Trump acknowledged that Ukraine would require assurances that Russia would not simply resume the war after any ceasefire is struck.

"We're going to work on some kind of a security package," he said. "I think if we make a deal, Russia is going to be very happy... I don't see it happening again."

In keeping with America’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) introduced in December, Europe, he suggested, would play the principal role, with the US supporting whatever arrangement emerged.

Zelenskiy has consistently argued that credible Western security guarantees are essential if Kyiv is to contemplate any territorial compromise in negotiations with Moscow. Zelenskiy can’t give up any Donbas territory – a key sticking point in the talks with Moscow – unless he can be sure Russia won’t simply reinvade a few years later. That means one of Nato membership, joining the EU and cover from the European’s Article 42/7 collective security guarantee, or at the very least, strong bilateral security deals with the US and leading EU nations. None of these have been forthcoming so a US offer to provide a real deal would be a breakthrough.

Asked whether peace talks could take place in Moscow, Trump said Putin had suggested the Russian capital as a venue.

"I said you're not going to meet in Moscow," Trump recalled.

Zelenskiy has already rejected a Moscow meeting on December 3, countering with a suggestion that Putin comes to Kyiv for talks. During the press conference with Trump he played down the idea of a Moscow meeting again with a wry comment: "It's difficult. There are a lot of Ukrainian drones there. It's dangerous."

Whether Trump's renewed optimism proves justified remains uncertain. But his remarks suggested a White House that increasingly sees the war not simply as a contest of territory, but as one of industrial capacity, technological innovation and endurance—an assessment that increasingly resembles Kyiv's own view of how the conflict is evolving.

More funding for Ukraine

The Ankara summit also delivered a second important win for Kyiv. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte said allies had pledged €70bn ($80bn) in military assistance for Ukraine in 2026, with a commitment to maintain at least equivalent support in 2027.

The pledge is not an EU budget line but a commitment by individual Nato members, many of which are already struggling to reconcile support for Ukraine with rising domestic defence bills and weak public finances. Its significance is therefore political as much as military: after months of doubts over whether Europe could sustain the war effort, allies have again promised to keep Ukraine funded.

The new package comes on top of the €90bn EU loan agreed in December and covers an expected shortfall this year due to higher than expected military spending.

Even so, the burden is becoming harder to carry in an increasingly dysfunctional European economy. Several governments are warning that they are running out of fiscal space, while calls for higher Nato defence spending are competing with the cost of supporting Kyiv. For example, on the same day as the press conference, the government of the Netherlands announced it has run out of money to support Ukraine. At the same time the EU has just cut its long-term 2028-2034 funding for Ukraine in its next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) budget plan due to the growing lack of cash.

For Ukraine, however, the commitment would help cover part of this year’s expected military financing gap and strengthen Zelenskiy’s position as he argues that Russia can still be forced into serious negotiations.