Zelensky Tells NATO he Wants ‘Strong Decisions’ Ahead of Trump Meeting at This Week’s Crunch Summit

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told NATO he is looking for “strong decisions” ahead of his planned meeting with President Donald Trump at the alliance summit in Ankara this week.

NATO members should stop hoarding air defence missiles in their domestic warehouses and hand them over to Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said ahead of the first day of this week’s NATO alliance summit in Ankara, Turkey.

While U.S. President Donald Trump is to use the meeting to make clear to his fellow leaders that their defence spending levels aren’t sufficient and need to be increased to hold the alliance together, resolving the Ukraine war is also a high priority. Trump has already held separate calls with both Ukraine’s Zelensky and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin over the weekend and is due to have a crunch in-person meeting with Zelensky in Ankara this week.

Ahead of that meeting and others at the summit, President Zelensky revealed his weapons shopping list this morning, emphasising the importance of NATO members surrendering their stocks of air defence Patriot missiles. The highly technically sophisticated, expensive, and extremely in-demand defensive weapon systems have been previously provided to Ukraine, but Russia has proven able to launch more ballistic missiles than Ukraine has Patriots to intercept them with, leading to something akin to air defence rationing.

A large air raid on Kyiv last week was one of the deadliest of the war to date, and another major strike overnight into this morning again saw the Ukrainian capital struck with a mix of drones and missiles, killing 14. Ukraine can intercept drones and cruise missiles fairly well, Zelensky said on Monday morning, but ballistic missiles — which fly into space before turning back towards earth and plummeting towards their targets at enormous speed — require countermeasures of extraordinary capability.

He said in a statement: “Our warriors performed well today in intercepting drones and cruise missiles, but unfortunately not Russian ballistic missiles. And the reason lies in the insufficient supply of interceptor missiles.”

It is therefore “critically important” that the NATO meeting this week come to “strong decisions”, Zelensky said, and that to do any less would encourage Russia to keep up its strikes. These remarks followed others on Sunday night when Zelensky laid claim to air defence missiles owned by Western nations, and wrote there was a “necessary quantity” of Patriot missiles in the world for Ukraine’s needs, stating: “Missiles for Patriots are needed not in warehouses right now, but in Patriot units in Ukraine”.

He signed off with what could be interpreted as a somewhat sardonic mark of appreciation, stating: “I thank everyone who is providing real help”. Ukraine’s Foreign Secretary Andrii Sybiha also banged this drum on Monday, reports The Guardian, which noted that he stated ahead of the NATO meeting that “all decisions on air defence are needed now… The time for weak steps has passed”.

This week’s Ankara summit, hosted by Turkey — one of the alliance’s most mercurial members and perhaps its closest to Russia — will see sessions held on Tuesday and Wednesday and is likely to focus on its Europe and Canada members improving their lagging defence spending as the U.S. calls for more burden sharing. This is likely to be acutely embarrassing for the United Kingdom, which has been one of the leading NATO member states for the whole history of the alliance until now, where it finds itself with a government unable or unwilling to fund the armed forces, leading to a series of political disasters and military readiness failures in recent months.

While President Trump will want to come out of the summit with progress on Europe, mentally leaving behind the peace dividend mindset of large welfare states and small militaries behind, European states will likely look to use the alliance to boost pledges to non-NATO member Ukraine. Meanwhile, Turkey has its own ambitions for this week. As noted by Euractiv, the Erdogan government maintains its years-long ambition to buy American-made F-35 fighters, something that was previously blocked due to both Turkey’s historic willingness to do business with Russia and anxiety among the Greeks and Israelis over how Erdogan might use such advanced fighters.