When military leaders from roughly 50 nations met in Brussels on Friday to discuss aid shipments to Kyiv, one was noticeably absent: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Instead of attending the gathering, the 27th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, in person, Mr. Hegseth dialed in and participated virtually.
It was the first time since the group’s creation three years ago that the Pentagon’s top civilian was not physically present for an in-person meeting of the group, as the Trump administration treats Ukraine less like a partner and moves closer to Russia.
President Trump promised on the campaign trail to settle the war between Russia and Ukraine even before he was sworn in, and said that he could do it within 24 hours. But cease-fire negotiations with Washington, Kyiv and Moscow have failed to yield an end to fighting that has led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Ukrainian and 150,000 Russian soldiers.
U.S. leadership of the contact group had provided a lifeline of arms and matériel for Ukraine’s armed forces, but the flow of goods has largely petered out since Mr. Trump’s second inauguration.
Ukraine particularly needs air-defense munitions, such as the Patriot missiles the United States previously shipped. That was brought into sharp focus last week when a Russian missile attack in central Ukraine struck near a playground, killing 19 civilians, including nine children.
Mr. Hegseth handed leadership of the contact group to Britain before its last meeting, held in February. John Healey, Britain’s defense secretary and now the group’s chairman, led the meeting on Friday with Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister.
Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that the officials discussed “progress towards achieving an enduring peace to the war in Ukraine and European nations leading efforts to support Ukraine’s defense.”
At a news conference after the meeting, Mr. Healey and Mr. Pistorius flanked their Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov, and spoke positively but delicately about the United States’ commitment to supporting Ukraine.
“He took part, he addressed the auditorium with some, I would say, interesting and correct assessments,” Mr. Pistorius said of Mr. Hegseth. “In the future, in the weeks to come, we will see what’s going to happen with the U.S. participation, with the U.S. support.”
“I am not able to have a look in the crystal ball,” Mr. Pistorius added. “We wait and see.”
In response to a reporter’s question about Mr. Trump’s priorities in sending an envoy to Moscow but not sending Mr. Hegseth to the contact group meeting, Mr. Umerov sidestepped the issue.
“U.S. has told us after the new administration stepped in that they will be beside Europe, beside Ukraine, but their focus will be in Asia-Pacific or in the Pacific,” Mr. Umerov said. “They’re still participating in U.D.C.G. They are providing us security assistance, and they took a lead in a peace initiative, which they are focused.”
Mr. Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd J. Austin III, said goodbye to the organization in January during its 25th meeting, which was held at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. He had spent years offering military advice to the group based on his decades of combat leadership, which included multiple command tours as a general in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The coalition to support Ukraine must not flinch,” Mr. Austin said in his closing remarks at the summit. “It must not falter. And it must not fail. Ukraine’s survival is on the line. But so is all of our security.”
Mr. Austin created the group just two months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and it became a potent tool for supporting Kyiv.
At the gathering in January, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine implored the group to “not drop the ball now” when it came to supporting his nation in the form of weapons and other kinds of military hardware.
The Biden administration approved 74 packages of military aid for Ukraine drawn from the Pentagon’s stockpile and worth more than $34 billion. Ukraine received roughly the same amount of U.S. funding to purchase military hardware directly from American defense firms.
The Trump administration has not announced any new aid for Ukraine since Inauguration Day, even though roughly $3.85 billion remains untapped, according to the Pentagon.
The lack of new military support is not the only way the Trump administration has frozen Ukraine out.
According to Pentagon statements, Mr. Hegseth has spoken privately or met with leaders from 16 nations since taking office. He spoke briefly with Ukrainian officials at the contact group’s January meeting, but is not otherwise known to have spoken or met with any representatives from the government or military in Kyiv.
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