Zelensky lands in Ankara, hands outstretched to Trump and NATO

Kyiv arrives in Ankara with hands outstretched

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed this Tuesday, July 7, in Ankara for the 36th NATO summit, a two-day gathering of leaders from the alliance's thirty-two member countries. On X, he summed up his expectations in one unambiguous line: "We expect a strong and productive summit. Decisions are needed now."

This arrival comes in a particularly heavy context: Kyiv is barely recovering from a new deadly Russian attack, and Ukrainian air defenses are reportedly running low on American-made Patriot interceptors, the most effective weapon against Russian ballistic missiles.

A meeting with Trump set for the very next day

According to two sources close to the summit's organization cited by the Kyiv Independent, Zelensky is set to meet U.S. President Donald Trump as early as the next day to discuss a possible path toward ending the war with Russia. This bilateral meeting, symbolically high-stakes after past tensions between the two men, will be closely watched by every Western capital.

Investment, production, support for Ukraine

NATO's official website set three priority themes for this summit: defense investment, ramping up weapons production, and long-term support plans for Ukraine against Russia. This triptych reflects the alliance's structural concerns after more than four years of war in Europe.

At the previous summit in The Hague, member countries had committed to raising their defense spending to five percent of annual GDP by 2035, a considerable jump from the previous two-percent target that had been in place for years.

American pressure on allied spending

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed Monday that defense spending would remain an absolute priority of the summit, demanding clear and credible plans and clear, concrete and credible plans from allies to reach the stated targets. He warned that President Trump expected all allies to commit immediately and urgently to the five-percent path.

A cruel shortfall exposed by recent strikes

Zelensky was brutally clear on this point even before arriving in Ankara: "Our warriors did intercept the drones and cruise missiles today, but unfortunately not the Russian ballistic missiles. And the reason lies in the insufficient supply of interceptor missiles." That statement confirms, in the Ukrainian president's own words, the scale of the problem.

According to several Ukrainian officials, the shortage of Patriot interceptors has worsened further because resources were diverted to air defense during the conflict with Iran earlier this year, creating a more severe shortage than at any other recent point in the war.

A direct appeal to Washington and its allies

Zelensky said he wanted to discuss directly the urgent deliveries and deliveries of interceptor missiles for U.S.-made Patriot systems, stressing that these missiles are not produced exclusively by Americans. He said: "We know which friends, not just the Americans by the way, have these capabilities. We badly need them, it's an urgent need."

At least fifteen dead before arriving in Ankara

Even before his departure for Turkey, Zelensky had called on the countries attending the summit to make strong decisions, after at least fifteen civilians and fifteen people were killed in Kyiv during a Russian bombardment combining drones and missiles. This tragic toll, occurring just hours before the summit's opening, adds an extra moral urgency to the Ankara meeting.

"The United States and Europe have enough strength to stop this terror," Zelensky hammered, a statement that sums up the spirit in which he approaches this summit: less a classic diplomatic negotiation than a direct appeal to collective Western responsibility.

Overwhelmed air defenses despite partial successes

Ukrainian forces managed to intercept most of the drones and cruise missiles in this attack, a real technical success that stands in violent contrast with the inability to intercept ballistic missiles for lack of sufficient Patriot interceptors. This contrast alone illustrates the nature of the problem: it is not a lack of skill, it is a lack of ammunition.

An evening with unexpected guests

Zelensky, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are set to join an official dinner with NATO leaders Tuesday evening, an expanded format that illustrates the alliance's intent to link the Ukraine file to broader security concerns, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.

Leaders are also expected to meet with regional representatives from Middle Eastern nations, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, while NATO defense ministers will hold talks with their counterparts from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

A signal of cohesion against authoritarian regimes

This expanded diplomatic architecture sends a clear signal: the war in Ukraine is no longer treated as an isolated regional conflict, but as one front among several in a broader systemic confrontation pitting the West and its democratic partners against authoritarian regimes, from Russia to China, by way of Iran and North Korea.

Accumulated tensions with the alliance

Donald Trump's presence at this summit remains marked by a series of accumulated tensions with his European allies. His repeated threats to withdraw American troops from Europe, his controversial proposal to annex Greenland, which several European nations called "dangerous," and his irritation toward member countries that refused to back the military campaign against Iran, have all weakened the alliance's apparent cohesion.

Last May, Trump had said bluntly: "We helped them [the Europeans] with Ukraine... But when we needed them, they weren't there. We have to remember that." A statement that illustrates the transactional logic he brings to every collective security file.

A troop withdrawal already underway in Germany

The Trump administration has already carried out the withdrawal of roughly five thousand troops stationed in Germany, following a thorough review of the American military posture in Europe, and is raising the possibility of also withdrawing troops from Italy and Spain, a prospect that deeply worries the capitals concerned.

A conflict that hasn't disappeared from the radar

It remains uncertain whether the war against Iran, triggered in late February by American and Israeli strikes, will be formally addressed at this summit. According to Reuters, leaders are nonetheless expected to state in the final declaration that Iran must never possess nuclear weapons and to call on Tehran to fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

This Iran question will weigh in the background of all the discussions, notably because the diversion of American military resources toward that theater has, according to several analyses, directly contributed to the worsening shortage of Patriot interceptors for Ukraine.

A dual emergency for the alliance

This dual emergency, Ukrainian and Iranian, illustrates the growing difficulty NATO faces in allocating its limited resources across several simultaneous crisis theaters, a reality that weighs directly on the concrete decisions expected at the close of the Ankara summit.

Guarantees, not just promises

According to an official cited by the Kyiv Independent, one of Zelensky's central priorities in his meeting with Trump will be precisely the shortage of Patriot interceptors, a concrete and urgent matter that goes well beyond the usual declarations of symbolic support. Kyiv is seeking firm commitments and commitments with numbers and dates, not new diplomatic formulas.

This approach reflects a notable shift in Ukrainian diplomatic strategy: after more than four years of war, Kyiv has learned that declarations of solidarity, however sincere, never replace actual deliveries of equipment on the ground.

The fear of a "hollow" exercise

Zelensky himself warned that Ukraine expects this summit not to become a "hollow exercise," a phrase that reflects genuine concern about the risk of Ankara turning into a mere communications operation with no concrete consequences for Ukrainian defenders on the ground.

Producing faster, producing more

Beyond the political announcements, the summit will also have to address member countries' actual industrial capacity to produce more missile defense systems, an industrial challenge that goes well beyond mere political will and touches directly on supply chains and the availability of specialized components.

This industrial dimension, less spectacular than bilateral meetings between heads of state, will nonetheless determine much more directly Ukraine's ability to receive, in the coming months, the Patriot interceptors it urgently and demonstrably needs.

A credibility test for the whole alliance

This summit therefore represents a credibility test that goes well beyond the Ukraine file alone, measuring NATO's collective capacity to turn its spending commitments into concrete production capabilities deliverable within timeframes compatible with the urgency on the ground.

A dense diplomatic schedule in forty-eight hours

The Ukrainian delegation will have to navigate an extraordinarily dense agenda over the summit's two days, between the bilateral meeting with Trump, participation in the expanded dinner with Indo-Pacific partners, and multiple bilateral meetings with other European heads of state sensitive to the missile defense file.

This diplomatic density illustrates the scale of Ukrainian expectations for this particular summit, seen by several analysts as one of the most critical gatherings of the year for the future of Western military support for Kyiv.

The weight of diplomatic fatigue

After more than four years of war, the Ukrainian delegation must also contend with a form of diplomatic fatigue perceptible among some Western partners, making every summit a little harder to turn into firm, quantified commitments than it was two or three years ago.

Turkey, a host with an ambivalent diplomacy

The symbolic choice of Ankara as host city for this summit is not neutral. Turkey has maintained, throughout the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, an ambivalent diplomatic posture, supplying military equipment to Ukraine while keeping active dialogue channels open with Moscow, a balancing act that earns it both criticism and respect within the alliance.

This Turkish ambivalence, documented since the start of the conflict, sometimes complicates reading Ankara's real commitments to Ukrainian military support, despite its role as symbolic host of this summit, crucial for the future of European defense.

A geographic symbol between Europe and the Middle East

Turkey's geographic position, at the hinge between Europe and the Middle East, also gives this summit an additional symbolic dimension, at a time when the Ukrainian and Iranian files are increasingly intertwined in Western strategic priorities.

Precedents that call for caution

Recent NATO summit history on Ukraine has repeatedly shown a persistent gap between the solemn announcements made at official gatherings and the real pace of equipment deliveries on the ground, a pattern that today fuels skepticism among several observers about the concrete results expected from Ankara.

This skepticism is not baseless: it rests on documented cases where financial commitments announced with great fanfare took several months to translate into actual deliveries, a delay that the current situation on the Ukrainian ground no longer allows without considerable human risk.

Why this summit could nonetheless be different

Some elements set apart this summit from previous ones: the documented, recent urgency of the Patriot shortage, the simultaneous presence of Indo-Pacific partners facing their own tensions with China, and the heightened media pressure around the human toll of recent Russian strikes.

An industry watching every announcement closely

American and European defense manufacturers are closely following the expected conclusions of this summit, aware that any additional commitment on military spending or deliveries to Ukraine will translate directly into new contracts and added pressure on production lines already running at their limit.

This economic dimension of the summit, rarely highlighted in mainstream media coverage, nonetheless weighs heavily on the political decisions made in Ankara, with governments having to balance immediate military urgency against industrial capacity actually available in the short term.

The challenge of production timelines against battlefield urgency

Even with budgets released immediately after the summit, manufacturing timelines for Patriot systems and their interceptors remain measured in months, a time lag that could prove costly for Ukrainian defenders if Russian strikes continue at the current pace during this industrial transition period.

European countries under pressure to speed up

Several European NATO member countries are facing growing pressure, both from Washington and from their own public opinion, to accelerate their financial and material contributions to Ukraine's support, at a moment when the Patriot shortage concretely illustrates the consequences of collective Western delay.

This pressure is felt unevenly across capitals: some Scandinavian and Baltic countries have maintained a steady pace of contribution since the start of the conflict, while others, geographically farther from the front line, struggle to maintain the same level of financial commitment over the years.

The risk of an East-West European rift

This disparity in contribution feeds a real risk of rift within the European Union and the Atlantic alliance itself, between Eastern countries directly exposed to the Russian threat, and some Western countries whose commitment is seen as insufficient given the documented urgency on Ukrainian ground.

A verdict that will be measured in weeks, not hours

The real verdict on this Ankara summit will not be known at the end of the two days of official meetings, but in the weeks following its close, once it becomes possible to measure whether the promised Patriot interceptors actually arrive on Ukrainian soil, and whether defense spending targets translate into concrete industrial orders.

The human urgency behind the diplomacy

Behind every technical discussion about GDP percentages and industrial supply chains, there are Ukrainian civilians who sleep, or rather who do not sleep, under the threat of ballistic missiles their country can no longer intercept for lack of sufficient ammunition. It is this human urgency, more than any abstract geopolitical stake, that must remain at the center of what the West decides in Ankara.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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