At inflection point, Pentagon chief holds final forum for Ukraine aid

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — More than two dozen times since Russia’s 2022 invasion, President Joe Biden’s Pentagon chief, Lloyd Austin, has gone around the table with his international counterparts to secure weapons needed for Ukraine’s defense.

On Thursday, Austin chaired his final meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an assemblage of more than 30 nations providing military aid to Kyiv, closing out what has been a central aspect of the Biden administration’s investment in the three-year-old war. It also has been a core part of Austin’s record as defense chief during a tumultuous period that includes Biden’s calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the renewal of major conflict in Europe and the Middle East.

With Washington leading the way, Ukraine’s supporters have pledged more than $126 billion in assistance, facilitating a surge of tanks, mortars and other arms that has enabled the country’s survival.

Austin characterized the collective effort to stave off Ukraine’s destruction as an “engine of global security” and said the campaign to safeguard Ukrainian sovereignty must continue.

“We must stand up for our security; we must hold firm to the bedrock principle that aggression is a sin,” Austin told reporters. “And we must not lose our nerve.”

But as Biden prepares to hand off to President-elect Donald Trump, the course ahead is shrouded in uncertainty as Kyiv struggles to sustain adequate fighters and firepower and steadily loses ground to Russia’s far larger military.

“The reality is that we’ve discovered some of the limits of even the unprecedented amount of military assistance that has been provided,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation.

“In a war of attrition, generally speaking you’re always in a disadvantaged position if you’re the smaller country with fewer resources,” he said. “So the laws of physics are coming back into play here.”

After the Biden administration’s repeated promises to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” America’s role as its biggest backer is now in question. While Trump has not spelled out specific plans, he has vowed to broker an immediate end to the war, potentially on terms that would force Ukraine to cede significant territory and would be unlikely to include near-term entry into the NATO military alliance. Trump and his advisers have not said either whether they will continue the Ukraine aid forum.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who traveled to Germany to attend Thursday’s meeting, suggested that Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration would mark the start of a “a new era” requiring European nations taking greater responsibility for their collective fate — and that of Ukraine.

“Now it’s on all of us, on how we work together, how ready we are to own our future,” he said. “The more determination we show in defending our interests, the more … our partners and especially the U.S. will see it’s good to stay on our side.”

While Ukrainian officials have pushed Western nations since the start of the war to provide more advanced weaponry and complained that foreign commitments haven’t always materialized, they now face a potentially greater test: whether they can sustain even existing levels of military support and secure their core goals in any settlement to end the war.

“We’ve come such a long way that it would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now,” Zelenskyy said.

Thursday’s discussions at this U.S. air base in Germany underscored the gap between hopes early in the war of fully reclaiming Ukrainian territory and the grinding stalemate that has hardened since the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. While Ukraine took Russian territory in an incursion into its southern Kursk region last year, Kremlin forces have made slow but steady gains in eastern Ukraine, aided by an infusion of weapons and troops from North Korea and additional arms from Iran.

Even leading Biden administration officials who have been the strongest proponents of Ukraine’s sovereignty now acknowledge that Kyiv is unlikely to achieve its goal of expelling Russia entirely. In a recent interview, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that any settlement would probably allow Russia to retain — in practice but not by law — the fifth of Ukrainian territory it now occupies.

Trump, who discussed the war in talks with Zelenskyy last month, has long voiced skepticism about Ukraine, which played a role in his first impeachment, and expressed his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Rep. Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican, has said that American support should not be a “blank check” for Ukraine and promised to bring the war to a “responsible end.”

Even before taking office, the president-elect is challenging the principles that Biden has championed — rejecting Russia’s use of force against a smaller neighbor — as he refuses to rule out using force to acquire Greenland and threatens to take over the Panama Canal.

Since Trump’s reelection, however, Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials have repeatedly praised the president-elect as someone who could invoke fear in Putin. Zelenskyy has also publicly stated more adamantly that he hopes to end the “hot phase” of the war this year, potentially agreeing to a ceasefire with the opportunity for Kyiv to “diplomatically” reclaim its occupied land later and security guarantees to protect against future Russian attacks.

Zelenskyy’s shift in position — he previously pushed for restoring Ukraine’s full territorial integrity before accepting any stop to the fighting — has perhaps been spurred on by a worsening battlefield situation.

Though Kyiv’s surprise cross-border offensive into Russia’s Kursk region has been touted by officials as a success, Ukrainian forces have struggled to hold the land they captured there and Russia has already reclaimed more than half of Ukraine’s initial gains.

Ukrainian officials also have grown more critical in private of the outgoing administration’s approach to security aid, saying that Biden’s hesitation in approving some weapons systems hurt Kyiv’s chances on the battlefield.

Austin pushed back against the idea that Ukraine was falling short in its war effort, noting the U.S. assessment that Russia has lost 700,000 soldiers to death or injury and massive amounts of equipment fighting Ukraine. He also said Russia would spend 40 percent of its budget this year on the war.

Such losses “without accomplishing a single strategic objective — that’s unthinkable,” he said.

Thursday’s meeting marked a final public moment for Austin, a Silver Star recipient who spent four decades in the Army, commanding U.S. troops in Iraq and heading U.S. forces across the Middle East in the battle against the Islamic State, before he steps down.

After becoming the first African American defense secretary in 2021, Austin has attempted to counter a major military challenge from China and fix America’s decaying defense industry. He also forged a close relationship with his Israeli counterpart during that country’s grinding war in Gaza.

An introvert, Austin has been a low-profile Pentagon chief in comparison to some predecessors and peers, opting out of socializing with staff and reporters on foreign trips and rarely appearing on televised news shows.

While Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan have repeatedly taken to the airwaves or think tank events in recent weeks to tout the departing president’s foreign policy record, Austin has stayed out of the spotlight.

But current and former aides say that Austin has taken on the Ukraine assistance mission in a personal way, “dialing for dollars” as he has placed rounds of calls to foreign counterparts to secure contributions as part of the Contact Group process.

Austin choked up as he closed out Thursday’s private meeting with his fellow defense ministers, including Ukraine’s Rustem Umerov, describing his leadership of the Ukraine armament effort as an “honor of the lifetime,” according to an official familiar with the event.

Ben Wallace, who served as British defense minister from 2019 to 2023, said the Ramstein grouping had enabled “a regular drumbeat of military support and dialogue with Ukrainian military leadership.” Britain chaired several similar multinational meetings in support of Ukraine early in the war before the United States, with its far bigger military budget, took it over.

“The U.S. has maintained its leadership and influence, which of course will decline if the new president seeks to withdraw from Europe,” Wallace said.