(Bloomberg) -- European Union leaders are trying to work out whether they can keep the Ukrainian war effort going if Donald Trump decides to shut off support from the US.
Officials held discussions on whether the bloc will be ready to foot the bill for the war during their meeting in Budapest Thursday, according to people familiar with the discussion. The big concern is that Trump will seek to shift the financial burden on Europe, although nothing in the initial conversations suggests a massive change of tack, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing private conversations.
Trump promised during the election campaign that he will quickly end the fighting in Ukraine, but has been ambivalent in his support for Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Thursday urged European leaders to focus on maintaining the supply of weapons and not undermine his position with talk of a cease-fire or concessions to Vladimir Putin.
“If we talk about the possibility of peace today, it’s because the Ukrainians had extraordinary courage and because the West supported Ukraine,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told reporters as she arrived for a second day of talks Friday. “That said, we’ll see how the scenario evolves in the coming weeks.”
The EU has been the biggest provider of aid to Ukraine, allocating €118 billion ($127 billion) since the start of the conflict, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. The US has provided €85 billion in total, although the flow of money has tailed off this year, with just €17 billion allocated. The EU has supplied almost double that amount.
Some European officials said the real issues was not so much the money itself, which should still be there, but the available military resources that have come primarily from the US, one of the people said.
The US is a crucial source for some of the most powerful weapons, such as F-16s and ATACMs, long-range missiles that allowed Ukraine to strike Russian troops far behind the frontlines. Its manufacturing capacity is also vital for maintaining the supply of 155mm shells that is at the core of Ukraine’s defensive operations.
While some argued Europe should bide its time until Trump’s inauguration in January to find out about his intentions toward Ukraine, others said leaders don’t have that luxury and the European Commission should be coming up with proposals on how the bloc will respond if US aid is shut off.
That’s a controversial idea all the same.
“Some EU leaders say that in such a case, the EU should take on full financial responsibility for Ukraine,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said in a video posted on Facebook. “I see this as impossible, and Slovakia will not agree to it.”
Trump has already begun his first round of phone calls with European leaders.
At least one of those conversations involved discussions of how Trump might approach negotiations with Putin, according to a senior official briefed on the call. Trump signaled that he is aware he can’t just push Ukraine into granting concessions to Putin without getting anything in return, the official said, on condition of anonymity. A spokesperson for Trump wasn’t immediately available to comment.
During the summit discussion, Orban told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron that they should be talking to Putin as well, or the EU will be sidelined in discussions over Ukraine’s future, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the summit host and Trump’s biggest supporter in Europe, told reporters on Thursday it is now an “open question” whether the US and the EU will deliver the latest aid package of €50 billion.
In an radio interview on Friday, Orban said Europe can’t finance what he described as a “lost” war on its own and claimed the US will pull its support. But the Hungarian leader, who has long opposed aid to Kyiv and cultivated close ties with both Putin and Trump, is far from a honest broker in the discussion.
Zelenskiy, who joined leaders in Budapest on Thursday, said Trump’s election victory hasn’t swayed European Union support for Ukraine. Recent weeks have seen Russian troops making gains on the battlefield, exposing Kyiv’s shortages of both the manpower and weapons.
“Colleagues understand very well that supporting Ukraine is strengthening ourselves,” European Council President Charles Michel told reporters late on Thursday. “If we would be weak with Russia, what signal we send to the rest of the world, including China.”
--With assistance from Ania Nussbaum, Marton Kasnyik and Daniel Hornak.
(Updates with Orban comment to Scholz and Macron in 13th paragraph)
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