Politics

After Trump’s turn toward Putin, NATO leader rushes to Washington

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is making a last-minute trip to Washington to meet with President Donald Trump, just days after Trump appeared to acquiesce to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands to end the war in Ukraine.

A short press release from NATO confirmed the two-day trip and that Rutte will meet with Trump. It did not provide any further details about the reason for the trip.

Rutte is among several European leaders who have spent the past several months coaxing Trump into backing Ukraine more forcefully. The announcement follows Trump’s sudden shift late last week bringing him more in line with Putin’s position.

Following a two-hour phone call with Putin Thursday, Trump announced that the two leaders agreed to meet again in Budapest to discuss an end to the war. A day later during a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump largely dismissed a request to provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles and then, in a social media post after the meeting, called for Ukraine to cede large swaths of its territory to Russia in exchange for peace.

But plans for another Trump-Putin summit fell apart on Tuesday following a phone call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that made clear Russia was not ready to budge off its demands for ending the war.

Despite that, Trump’s turnabout frustrated European leaders who have spent months backing Zelenskyy and praising Trump for his efforts to broker an end to the war while working to persuade him that Russia, not Ukraine, is responsible for the war and uninterested in peace.