President Donald Trump announced a new plan for distributing weapons to Ukraine in a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday. Through the plan, the U.S. would sell weapons to European nations, which would then transfer them to Ukraine.
Trump also threatened Russia with a new deadline for making a peace deal with Ukraine. If not met, the president promised to hit Russia with harsh tariffs.
“We’re going to be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days,” Trump said. “Tariffs at about 100%. You’d call them secondary tariffs.”
Billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons would be purchased by allies like Germany, Finland, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Denmark and then transferred to Ukraine. Patriot missile defense systems are among the weapons included. A source told CNN that other weapons could include offensive weapons like short-range missiles, Howitzer rounds, and medium-range air-to-air missiles.
Rutte said the agreement should push Russia to reconsider peace talks and said “speed is of the essence here.”
According to Axios, Trump shared a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 3 in which the Russian president explained his intent to escalate the war, saying he’d need 60 days to occupy the territory he’s targeting. To some critics, Trump’s 50-day deadline seems convenient.
Still, Trump hinted at his growing frustration with the Russian president, even as he told reporters in the Oval Office that his conversations with Putin are “always pleasant.”
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“I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done, and I always hang up say, ‘Well, that was a nice phone call,'” Trump said. “And then missiles launched into Kyiv or some other city and I said, ‘strange.'”
Trump was adamant that he wasn’t to blame for the continuing war.
“I felt we had a deal about four times,” Trump said. “But it just kept going on and on.”
During the meeting, Trump also blamed the Russia-Ukraine war on former President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. During the 2024 campaign, he had repeatedly insisted he could negotiate an end to the war in 24 hours.
“I’ve just really been involved in this for not very long. It wasn’t [my] initial focus,” Trump said. “This is a Biden war. This is a Democrat war. This is not a Republican or Trump war.”
