For European Nato leaders, Donald Trump’s laundry list of complaints against the alliance at the summit in Turkey this week was hardly a surprise. Unexpected were the US president’s warm words for Ukraine.
Trump’s Ankara pivot from outspoken criticism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy to letting the Ukrainian leader manufacture US weapons was the standout moment of a Nato leaders summit in Turkey that threatened at times to lurch into the bizarre.
The new tone left European allies cautiously optimistic that America’s mercurial leader had made a significant shift in favour of Kyiv.
“It’s relatively simple,” said one Nato diplomat. “Trump likes winners. And Ukraine, recently, has started winning.”
Trump’s threats to withdraw troops from Europe, his thirst for allies’ territory, his beef at their low defence spending and his ire at some Nato countries’ refusal to let his warplanes use their bases and airspace to attack Iran were well-worn diatribes. European leaders have learnt how to brush them off.
But even by those standards, Trump arrived in the Turkish capital delivering disquieting bombast.
“We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe,” he said on Tuesday, sitting alongside Turkey’s strongman leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Then came another threat. “[Greenland] should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark.”
Hanging over the summit was Trump’s war with Iran — from which other Nato leaders have recoiled for economic and strategic reasons. Overnight, the US launched another barrage of strikes on the Islamic republic, saying it was responding to Iranian attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
By Wednesday morning Trump was declaring that more strikes were coming and the deal reached just last month with Tehran to extend a ceasefire by 60 days was close to collapse. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Trump said. Iran’s leaders were “scum” and “loco”, he said.
Later on Wednesday, the US military said it had launched a new wave of strikes “to further degrade their ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz”.
Adding to the public acrimony, Trump used a meeting with Nato chief Mark Rutte to berate Spain (“a terrible partner” and “hopeless, bad people”) and blast the UK, Germany and Italy for not backing his Iran war.
But the US president’s mood then shifted by the hour, apparently lubricated by Rutte’s praise that his “leadership is transforming this alliance”.
Erdoğan did his best to help. At a private meeting of all 32 leaders, the Turkish president gave attendees their own monogrammed revolver — with bullets.
Trump emerged from the talks and lauded the “tremendous love” in the room.
But it was the US leader’s warm words for Ukraine as he sat beside Zelenskyy that were the most unexpected moment and left European delegations pleasantly surprised.
It marked a stark contrast with the leaders’ explosive White House meeting in February 2025 when Trump lashed out at Zelenskyy, accusing him of ingratitude and saying he had “no cards”.
“It’s hard to believe, correct, from the Oval Office to now . . . I think we’ve developed a very good relationship,” Trump told Zelenskyy in Ankara. “This is going to be the beginning . . . And you know, the country [of Ukraine] has a lot of future.”
Now the US would even give Kyiv a licence to make Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles, a crucial new defence as Ukraine comes under more bombardment.
“That’s pretty cool,” Trump said.
“Russia’s remaining serious threat of ballistic missiles could be, with time, neutralised if Patriot licences will be given to Ukraine,” said Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House.
“Trump might make this move to change [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s calculus that he can endlessly destroy Ukraine and compel him to stop the war. It is Ukraine’s access to the US military capabilities at scale that really scares Russia.”
Officials told the FT they hoped it signalled a sustained shift in US support for Kyiv and increased pressure on Russia.
“Trump has been briefed that Ukraine is seizing the initiative in the war at the moment,” said Lutsevych. “It looks to him like Putin has rejected a good deal and is now in trouble due to Ukraine’s upper hand in mid- and long-range drone technology.”
Trump told reporters he would speak to Putin on Wednesday evening, saying he thought the Russian leader’s conditions for ending the war were “changing”.
“I think they’re probably getting a little bit better toward some of the things that you like,” Trump told Zelenskyy. “We have a lot of pressure on President Putin. I don’t think he likes what’s going on . . . I don’t think he’s thrilled with what’s happening.”
That new tone also helped Europeans see past the president’s other barbs, said officials briefed on the leaders’ discussions.
Trump had made more US support for Ukraine “clear” and was weighing additional steps to help Kyiv break through on the battlefield, one official said.
“He was decent and serious inside [the room],” said a second official.
A wartime summit that began with more Trump anger towards Europe had closed on an optimistic tone, other leaders said.
“I was very happy about US president Trump saying there is a ‘feeling of love in the air’ in his closing statement,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said after the talks. British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he endorsed Trump’s verdict that “in the room there was great spirit, great unity. That was reflected across the piece”.
Additional reporting by John Paul Rathbone and Lucy Fisher in Ankara and James Politi in Washington
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