‘Enticing Trump’ — Europe and Ukraine’s $90 billion gambit to win over the White House
Ukrainian President Zelensky is pushing a massive deal for U.S. weapons funded by Europe in what observers call a bid to buy the flighty U.S. President Donald Trump’s dedication.
Zelensky wants Europe to pay the U.S. $90 billion for weapons to Ukraine, "that we don’t have ourselves: above all, planes and air defense, etc. — we’ll leave it at 'etc.' for now," as he said in a briefing after the meeting earlier this week. Kyiv is also proposing a $50 billion drone deal with the U.S. as part of the offer.
There are specific pieces of American military kit that have no European analogs at the moment. But the biggest item on the Ukrainian wish list is the exceedingly rare commodity of Trump’s attention. The proposed deal’s main purpose is "to entice Trump into political commitment," said John Foreman, a former defense attaché for the U.K. who served in both Moscow and Kyiv.
"Now, fortunately or unfortunately, America still provides those more exquisite capabilities: fast jets — despite capacity issues — missiles, air defenses, sensors, radars, highly protected armored vehicles, those sort of things,” Foreman told the Kyiv Independent.
"But it isn’t just about having tanks, it’s about signing on to a long-term political rhythm from Trump."
Trump has gone back and forth in public rhetoric regarding Ukraine. His administration has periodically frozen weapons deliveries that had already been approved. Just in the past week of negotiations, he has floated and retracted the prospect of giving Russia more Ukrainian territory.
"How can anybody possibly do diplomacy when the leader of the free world is changing his mind every time he gets out of bed?" Foreman quipped.
The appearance of European political royalty like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the U.K.’s Keir Starmer at the White House alongside Zelensky was "about the purity of the relationship with the Americans for Europe and for Ukraine," according to Chatham House associate fellow Timothy Ash.
"I'm sure if you got all those leaders and met them privately and they could say what they actually think, they would say 'we can't trust the Americans and we need to build our own autonomous defense capability,'" Ash told the Kyiv Independent.
"But that's going to take five to ten years in the interim. We'll still be dependent on U.S. arms supplies, so we hope the Americans continue to supply that kit until we're self-sufficient. That's the game plan."
Massive arms deals are among Trump’s favorite tools of foreign policy. The Pentagon in May touted a $142 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia as the largest in history. If completed, it might be true, though the ultimate rollout of a similarly massive $110 billion set of memoranda of intent with Saudi Arabia in 2017 remains in question.
Beyond political concerns, the top item on Ukraine’s wishlist is Patriot air defense systems, said Fabian Hoffmann, a missile specialist at the Oslo Nuclear Program.
"As a European, I'd rather keep that money in Europe, but there are just some products that are really difficult to get elsewhere," Hoffmann told the Kyiv Independent. "Patriot batteries and interceptors are probably the number-one product that they're looking to buy because that's just something where the SAMP/T is falling short and there's not really an alternative."
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a massive glut in weapons buying. The U.S. State Department tallied a record $117.9 billion in foreign arms transfers in 2024, compared to $47 billion in 2021, the year before. That has left the world’s arms producers on backorder.
"The waiting time for a newly produced Patriot Missile right now is something like 4-5 years,” said Hoffmann.
Zelensky's newly proposed drone deal is an expanded version of an earlier "mega deal" to sell Ukrainian drones to the U.S. The $50 billion figure is more than the total amount of cash publicly known to have gone into the Ukrainian drone industry. Ukrainian drone experts are cheering.
"It will bring engineering design to a level even higher than programming solutions from the IT sphere," Vitaliy Zaytsev, an aerospace engineer who runs unmanned aerial vehicle programs at three of Ukraine’s top universities, told the Kyiv Independent.
"It will make the country different, making us exporters of technology and not just raw materials."
Despite EU leaders rallying around Zelensky at this White House appearance, none have publicly signed on to funding the prospective new weapons deals.
"Europe is a $27 trillion economy, $100 billion is small change for Europe," said Ash, using the $100 billion number first reported by the Financial Times before Zelensky's public statement about the deal.
"The question is whether Europe and Ukraine can trust the Americans to honor defense supply agreements when Trump has proved not particularly reliable."
