By Maria Popova

July 9, 2026

The NATO Summit in Ankara this week echoed the Ukrainian anthem’s opening of “The glory and freedom of Ukraine have not yet perished”.

Despite multifaceted challenges and threats, the alliance holds on in dignity. Eighteen months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, after his administration cut off American aid to Ukraine, needled allies with tariffs and territorial threats to Greenland and Canada, cozied up publicly and repeatedly to Vladimir Putin, threatened to withdraw American troops from Europe, close bases, and even quit the alliance, and dragged the alliance’s attention toward an unresolved war of his own choosing in Iran, NATO leaders reaffirmed their commitment to Article 5, called Russia a long-term threat, and pledged strong, continued support to Ukraine.

The Ankara declaration reads like a rebuke to every obituary written for the alliance since 2025.

Those obituaries predicted: that Ukraine couldn’t hold on without the U.S. but would be forced into rapid capitulation; that Europe lacked the industrial capacity, the political will, or both, to fill the gap after the U.S. exit; and that the war would grind to a Kremlin-favourable close within months.

It has now been well over a year and not only has Ukraine not surrendered, it has turned things around with a highly successful series of drone strikes deep into Russia’s interior. The Ankara summit’s declaration spells out, in the dry language of communiqués, just how wrong that prediction was.

Europe and Canada did not simply patch a hole. They rebuilt the wall. As American aid receded, European and Canadian financing and materiel scaled up to cover the shortfall, and Ukraine’s own defence industry expanded its production of drones, artillery, and long-range strike systems at a pace that has startled even seasoned defense experts.

The summit declaration certified something that officials in Kyiv, Brussels, and Warsaw have been saying quietly for a while: Ukraine is no longer merely a recipient of Western security assistance. It is a provider of it, contributing battlefield expertise, drone technology, and intelligence that European militaries now draw on. Even the Trump administration signed onto this assertion. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a description of where the leverage sits.

The declaration’s second headline is equally important, and equally inconvenient for the war-fatigue thesis that has often popped up in Western op-ed pages. Allies committed funding for Ukraine through the next two years, with an explicit floor: year two should match or exceed year one. A fatigued alliance does not write forward-looking funding floors into a joint declaration. It writes exit ramps. Ankara wrote a floor.

Asked, absurdly, whether he’d consider talks in Moscow, Zelensky deadpanned that the city has become too dangerous lately, on account of Ukrainian drones. The retort got a big laugh from journalists and has gone viral on social media.

Canada’s posture in Ankara deserves emphasis. Mark Carney has spent the past year turning the applause from his Davos speech into an actual budget commitment, and in Ankara he did not hedge. He committed Canada to continued leadership in Operation Reassurance in Lativa, announced nearly $1 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, and spearheaded the creation of the Defense Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB)—a new multilateral institution headquartered in Canada, which will raise multilateral defense financing, i.e. it will function like a World Bank for procurement.

Carney said, plainly, that Ukraine will win. He described Russia as Canada’s direct adversary. Not a distant European problem, but a threat that sits, quite literally, across the Arctic from us. This is the kind of clarity that has been in short supply for some time, and it positions Ottawa as one of the alliance’s more serious voices at precisely the moment American seriousness is in question.

Which brings us to the Trump-Zelensky meeting that many outlets described as the friendliest yet. It was, by the standard of their previous encounters, cordial. It was not, however, evidence of any conversion on Trump’s part. Zelensky met Trump’s characteristic jabs with the same grace and perfect comedic timing that first made him Ukraine’s most popular comedian and later made him an inspiring wartime leader.

Asked, absurdly, whether he’d consider talks in Moscow, Zelensky deadpanned that the city has become too dangerous lately, on account of Ukrainian drones. The retort got a big laugh from journalists and has gone viral on social media.

Trump, for his part, kept slipping Putin’s talking points into his own. He literally told journalists to pose questions for Putin, which he would then relay to the Russian president. He mused that Russians and Ukrainians are not so different after all.

This rambling aside plugged into a supposed expression of sympathy for the war dead happens to be, word for word, one of Putin’s favourite justifications for attempting to erase Ukrainian statehood and nationhood. He again floated a 28-point plan that begins with Ukrainian territorial concessions Russia has not managed to win on the battlefield. He said he still won’t visit Ukraine while the war continues.

What actually changed the temperature in the room was not any pivot by Trump. It was Ukraine’s position on the map. A string of precision strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure, often thousands of kilometers into Russia’s rear as well as in its main, previously protected, cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, has been too effective to ignore.

Trump, as interested as he seems to be in helping Putin end the war on Russian terms, is never one to leave a winning narrative uncredited. To emphasize that the U.S. is helping Ukraine’s success, he promised Ukraine the rights to produce Patriot missiles domestically. This is much less useful than a decision to supply the interceptors, because domestic production takes time and Ukrainian civilians need the protection of Patriot interceptors today. But it is a concession on Trump’s part and better than nothing.

Ukraine earned that concession on the battlefield, not at the negotiating table. It is worth remembering, the next time someone predicts Ukraine’s collapse, that this war is being won and lost on exactly that ground.

Policy Columnist Maria Popova is the Hiram Mills Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal.