Trump Tells Russia To 'Make A Deal' At G7 Where Europe Now Funds Almost 100 Percent Of The Ukrainian Defense America Once Led, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The United States Was Still Helping Pay To Defend A Democracy

The Filing

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France. Arriving at the 52nd G7 summit on Tuesday, President Donald Trump called on Russia to "make a deal" to end its years-long invasion of Ukraine, resolving a long-standing concern that the United States was still expected to help pay for the defense of the nation being invaded.

The President delivered the appeal at a gathering where, by the host government's own accounting, European countries now supply almost the entirety of the military and financial aid sustaining Ukraine's resistance, a milestone made possible by the administration's steady reduction of American assistance to a figure approaching zero. Where Washington once led the Western effort to arm Kyiv, it arrived in France this week chiefly to recommend that Kyiv settle.

Officials traveling with the President framed the new arrangement as a triumph of burden sharing. "We ended the era of America paying for everybody else's wars," said one source within the administration, noting that European taxpayers had generously agreed to fund a defense the United States had spent the previous year defunding. The European Union's $104.5 billion loan package, which covers roughly two-thirds of Ukraine's financing needs through 2027, was offered as evidence that the system was working as designed.

The summit's other leaders, who had reorganized the agenda to return Ukraine to the top of it, reportedly spent much of Tuesday attempting to persuade the President that the war remained worth funding. Trump, for his part, urged Moscow to come to the table and pledged unspecified future support, while joining a G7 commitment to increase pressure on Russia through sanctions that the United States would help announce but not necessarily shoulder.

By the President's telling, the road to peace was now elegantly simple. Russia, the party that invaded, need only agree to stop, and Ukraine, the party invaded, need only agree to terms, leaving the United States free to claim authorship of any settlement its allies had financed.

At press time, the President was seeking sole credit for a ceasefire that European taxpayers would be paying to secure.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who positions himself as the indispensable peacemaker of a war he has stopped helping to fund, collecting credit for any settlement while contributing almost none of its cost.
§The administration's strongman branding, which recasts the abandonment of an ally as a masterstroke of burden sharing.
§Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, handed an American president who publicly presses the invaded country to "make a deal," with the war's largest former backer now reduced to a spectator.
§The Kremlin's long-term goal of splitting the Western alliance, advanced at a summit where the United States and Europe openly diverged over who should pay to stop Russia.
§China, which gains from a visibly strained democratic bloc it spent nothing to weaken.
§The U.S. Treasury's short-term ledger, relieved of Ukraine costs now shifted onto European taxpayers, at the price of the alliances that long magnified American power.
§Future U.S. presidents, who inherit the precedent that America may broker the peace of a war it declined to help win.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment