NATO’s leaders gathered in Ankara this week and left with a set of concrete commitments that touch the alliance’s most pressing questions: how to sustain Ukraine, how much to spend on their own defense, and whether a path toward ending the war might finally be opening.
The two-day NATO summit, held on July 7 and 8 and attended by heads of state and government from all 32 member countries, produced a large new aid package for Ukraine, a significant shift in US policy on advanced weapons, and an ambitious long-term spending target – alongside a notably warmer meeting between the American and Ukrainian presidents.
For an alliance that has spent recent years managing internal strains as much as external threats, the summit was framed by its members as a display of unity. The substance behind that framing is what will matter in the months ahead.
A Major Package for Ukraine
The headline outcome was financial and military support for Kyiv. NATO members pledged 70 billion euros – around $80 billion – in military equipment, assistance and training for Ukraine over the course of 2026, and committed to sustaining at least an equivalent level of support in 2027.
The scale and the multi-year framing matter. One of Ukraine’s persistent challenges has been the unpredictability of Western aid, with support arriving in fits and starts as domestic politics shifted in donor countries. A pledge that spans two years, agreed collectively by the alliance, is designed to give Kyiv more certainty as it plans its defense – and to signal to Moscow that Western backing is not about to evaporate.
The package is also a message to Russia about endurance. Much of the Kremlin’s strategy has rested on the assumption that Western resolve would eventually tire and that aid would dry up if the war dragged on long enough. A collective, publicly announced commitment stretching into 2027 is intended to undercut that calculation, telling Moscow that time is not necessarily on its side. Whether that deters or merely hardens Russian resolve is one of the war’s central uncertainties.
Patriots Made in Ukraine
The most striking single announcement concerned air defense. President Trump said the United States would give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot systems – among the most capable defenses against ballistic and cruise missiles – rather than simply supplying finished units.
It is a meaningful shift. Washington had previously resisted allowing foreign production of the Patriot, and the change hands Kyiv something it had long sought: a more sustainable, home-based supply of a weapon central to protecting its cities from Russian missile barrages. For Ukraine, which has repeatedly pleaded for more air defense as strikes hit civilian areas, the license is a substantial practical win, and one that could reshape how it defends itself over the longer term.
The 5% Spending Target
Beyond Ukraine, the summit focused on the members’ own wallets. Allies endorsed a new goal of spending 5% of GDP on defense and security by 2035 – a substantial increase, broken into 3.5% of GDP for core defense requirements and 1.5% for related areas such as infrastructure and resilience.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte pressed members to come forward with concrete plans to hit the target, and Trump – a longtime critic of allies he considered under-spending – told reporters there had been “tremendous unity” and that nations were making progress toward the goal. The figure is aspirational and a decade away, and meeting it will require politically difficult budget choices in many capitals. But agreeing on the number is itself a marker of how sharply the alliance’s sense of threat has risen.
The debate over spending has long been one of NATO’s most sensitive internal issues. For years, the United States has argued that European allies leaned too heavily on American military power while under-investing in their own, and successive US administrations pushed them to spend more. That several members are now willing to commit, on paper, to a figure far above the old 2% benchmark reflects both that sustained pressure and a genuine shift in how European governments assess the danger on their doorstep since the invasion of Ukraine.
A Warmer Trump-Zelensky Meeting
Much of the attention around the summit centered on the meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose relationship has at times been tense in public. This encounter struck a different tone. Trump praised Zelensky’s willingness to work toward a deal to end the fighting and said he believed an agreement to end the war was on the horizon.
The president described the meeting in warm terms, speaking of unity and goodwill in the room. No breakthrough or final settlement was announced, and optimism about ending a grinding war has been raised and dashed before. But the shift in tone was noted by observers as potentially significant, given how central the US-Ukraine relationship is to any eventual resolution – and how much the mood between the two leaders can shape expectations.
For Zelensky, the meeting carried real stakes beyond atmospherics. Ukraine’s continued defense depends heavily on American backing, and a public show of goodwill from the US president helps reassure both his own citizens and other allies that Washington remains committed. The challenge for Kyiv is to translate warm words into durable guarantees, since tone can shift quickly and any settlement would still have to protect Ukraine’s core interests rather than simply end the fighting on unfavourable terms. That balance – welcoming momentum toward peace while guarding against a bad deal – will shape Kyiv’s diplomacy in the months ahead.
Why Ankara Mattered
The choice of venue carried its own weight. Hosting the summit in Ankara put Turkey – a member with a distinctive position in the alliance, bordering conflict zones and balancing relationships east and west – at the center of the gathering. It was a reminder that NATO’s strength depends on holding together a diverse group of countries with different histories, geographies and priorities.
That diversity is also a source of friction, and summits like this are partly exercises in managing it. Reports from Ankara described the usual mix of public unity and private disagreement, with debates over spending, burden-sharing and strategy playing out behind the scenes even as leaders projected a common front. The war in Ukraine has been a grim but powerful force for cohesion, and it continues to concentrate the alliance’s attention as other conflicts flare around the world, from the Middle East to the war in Sudan.
What Comes Next
The commitments made in Ankara now face the harder test of implementation. The aid to Ukraine must actually be delivered, the Patriot licensing arrangement worked out in detail, and the spending target translated into real budgets by governments that will change hands several times before 2035.
The biggest question hanging over it all is the war itself. If the warmer tone between Washington and Kyiv genuinely signals movement toward negotiations, the summit could be remembered as a turning point; if the optimism fades, as it has before, the alliance will be left doing what it has done throughout the conflict – sustaining Ukraine and bracing itself for a long confrontation. Either way, Ankara set out, in concrete numbers, what NATO is prepared to commit. The follow-through is what will define whether the summit mattered.
