“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said at a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO summit in Ankara.

“It’s a defensive weapon, which I like better than an offensive weapon,” Trump said.

The U.S. president’s comments were quickly picked up by Russian state media, which keeps a keen eye on all news coming out of the NATO summit in Ankara.

Initial reporting was factual and brief, relaying the American president’s decision verbatim. State-aligned media had previously panned the idea as reckless and amplified Western skeptical voices calling the move a risk to U.S. national security over concerns the technology could fall into Russian hands.

Russia’s foreign ministry has criticized the Trump administration for continuing to back Ukraine, with Moscow’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying that Washington was giving up its role as an “honest broker” and shifting back toward more decisively supporting Kyiv.

Reporting by the FT from late June indicated that this was causing disillusionment with Trump amongst Putin’s close associates.

Wednesday’s announcement comes just days after Kremlin spokesperson Dimitry Peskov dropped Russia’s longstanding euphemism of the “special military operation” in Ukraine. Instead, speaking to Russian media on Sunday, it had become a “real war” due to the involvement of Western nations, Peskov said.

While Trump was unambiguous in Ankara about the licensing offer, some specifics would remain to be worked out with the U.S. contractors involved. It was unclear, for example, which type of interceptor missile – the simpler PAC-2 or the more capable PAC-3 – Trump intends to allow Ukraine to build.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly pleaded for the U.S.-made interceptors — the only weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal that can shoot down ballistic projectiles, whose high velocity and steep flight path make them difficult to stop.

He was expected to raise the issue with Trump during their meeting.

Trump said pressure could be applied to companies to produce Patriot missiles. “We have great power over the companies, those companies that make the Patriot,” he said.

“We haven’t informed the company of that yet, but that’ll work out all right. I’m sure they will be thrilled,” he said.

Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the interceptor missiles that go in the Patriot system.

Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv again overnight, officials said on Wednesday, a third attack on the Ukrainian capital in less than a week exploiting Ukraine’s critical shortage of U.S.-made air-defense interceptors.

While Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted 139 of the 169 drones during the overnight strikes on the country, they were again unable to down any of the five ballistic missiles used by Russia, air force data showed.

Trump said both sides in the war would like to see it end, but Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have both been “difficult.”

“We’ve settled a lot of wars, and this one is the one that I thought maybe would be the easiest, but Putin is a difficult character, and this guy’s a difficult character,” Trump said, referring to Zelenskyy, who was sitting next to him.

Zelenskyy said he wanted to discuss “some very important details” with Trump.

“I’m sure you will do everything to stop this war,” he told Trump.

Moscow has stepped up its air war on Ukraine in recent months as its ground advances have largely stalled and Ukrainian attacks on its military logistics and oil industry triggered widespread fuel shortages.

The interceptions took place on May 10 and 11 and were related to modified PC-12 turboprop aircraft that the U.S. military uses primarily for signals intelligence and scouting operations. The U.S. designation for the aircraft is U-28.

Contrary to initial reporting in German-language media, no aircraft seems to have illegally violated Austrian airspace. The U.S. Air Force had filed for an overflight permit for two aircraft on May 10, but didn’t use it. When later that day two different USAF aircraft approached Austrian airspace unannounced, jets were scrambled to meet them – but they turned back before crossing the border, Austrian military spokesperson Michael Bauer said in a statement on X on Wednesday.

The U.S. refiled the overflight permit for the following day and used it then. The Austrian air force sent fighter jets to confirm that the aircraft overflying the airspace matched what had been approved. “Some things you have to see for yourself,” Bauer said in a reply on X

Austrian jets were scrambled in a “priority A intercept” on May 11, Bauer said on Tuesday, marking the highest urgency in the Austrian air force’s nomenclature.

Later reporting by the major Austrian daily Der Standard cited the Austrian government as saying that, as of Wednesday, the verdict was still out on whether the planes that overflew Austrian airspace were the ones for which a permit had been issued. No further details were provided on what was taking so long for the verification.

Austria is not a member of the NATO alliance and has perpetual neutrality enshrined in its constitution. Transits by foreign militaries – whether by land or by air – require prior approval and are generally granted only if they are unrelated to a war. Austria was the fifth European country to close its airspace to U.S. activity related to the war in Iran, with the country’s vice chancellor, Andreas Babler, saying that Austrians want “nothing to do with Trump’s politics of chaos and his war.”

The May 11 intercept reportedly took place over the Totes Gebirge mountain range in Upper Austria, over 60 kilometers from the German border. The American planes were met by Eurofighter Typhoons.

Swiss news portal “20 Minuten” first reported on the incursion and it was later confirmed by other German-language media, although initial reporting stated that unpermitted airspace violations had taken place – a claim that was refuted by the Austrian military on Wednesday

“This flight took place after an administrative error in the overflight clearance paperwork was corrected,” an official from U.S. European Command told Defense News in an email. “The United States continues to work closely with Austrian authorities on any questions regarding overflights and fully complies with Austrian laws and procedures.”

Publicly available reporting of unauthorized U.S. overflights is rare, and permissions are generally granted in peacetime. Austria’s location and geography – a thin sliver of land between major NATO allies Germany and Italy, and dividing northern from southern Europe – makes it a prime transit route. Neighboring Switzerland has similar neutrality policies.

The most remarkable precedent is a case in October 2002, when the U.S. attempted to smuggle two F-117A Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft through Austrian airspace by filing a flight plan only for the accompanying KC-10A tanker aircraft. Austrian Draken fighter jets identified the undeclared aircraft and Vienna later lodged a formal diplomatic complaint.

The recent incidents, too, will be addressed through diplomatic channels, Bauer said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with new information from the U.S. military and the Austrian government refuting initial reporting that the airspace incursions were unauthorized.

The main engine of growth was Europe, where expenditure surged 14% to $864 billion − the highest level SIPRI has ever recorded for the continent and, among NATO’s European members, the fastest annual increase since 1953. Germany crossed the 2% of GDP threshold for the first time since 1990, with spending rising 24% to $114 billion; Berlin has since pledged to reach 3.5% by 2029. Spain’s military budget leaped 50% to $40.2 billion, also crossing 2% of GDP for the first time since 1994, while Poland spent 4.5% of its GDP on defense − the highest burden among all NATO members.

The pattern repeated itself in Asia and Oceania, where combined expenditure rose 8.1% to $681 billion, the region’s sharpest increase since 2009. China’s spending grew 7.4% to an estimated $336 billion, marking its 31st consecutive annual increase. Taiwan posted a 14% jump to $18.2 billion − its largest rise since at least 1988 − as Chinese military exercises around the island intensified. Japan’s $62.2 billion budget represented 1.4% of GDP, the highest military burden the longtime pacifist country has carried since 1958.

Russia and Ukraine, now in the fifth year of war, continued to expand their military outlays. Russia allocated an estimated $190 billion − 7.5% of GDP and a record 20% of total government expenditure − while Ukraine spent $84.1 billion, equivalent to a staggering 40% of GDP and 63% of government spending.

The overall 2.9% real-terms increase is the smallest annual rise since 2021, though that’s largely an accounting artifact. The dynamic is almost entirely explained by Washington’s failure to approve new financial military assistance for Ukraine during the year − aid that SIPRI counts as part of the donor country’s expenditure. U.S. spending fell 7.5% year over year to $954 billion, primarily because no new supplemental appropriations for Ukraine-related Defense Department support were passed in 2025, compared to a cumulative $127 billion approved over the previous three years. Outside the United States, global military spending grew by 9.2%.

SIPRI researchers were blunt about the outlook: “The decline in U.S. military expenditure in 2025 is likely to be short-lived,” said program director Nan Tian. Congress has already approved over $1 trillion for 2026, with a potential further rise to $1.5 trillion in 2027 if President Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal passes.

In addition to providing the latest numbers, SIPRI researchers also raised a concern about transparency. The June 2025 NATO summit raised the alliance’s spending target to 5% of GDP by 2035, with up to 1.5% points of that allowed to cover loosely defined “defense- and security-related” expenditures. Researchers warned that vague definitions risk incentivizing “creative accounting” and cited Italy’s reported attempt to count the cost of constructing a bridge to Sicily as military-related spending as an illustration of the problem. Because NATO does not publish disaggregated data, independent verification is becoming increasingly difficult.

Total NATO spending reached $1.581 trillion in 2025, equivalent to 55% of the global total −a figure that, SIPRI cautioned, may not accurately reflect the alliance’s actual operational military capacity.

Among the sites destroyed in recent weeks are key sites operated by the Iranian Ministry of Defense, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and hybrid entities that straddle civilian and military applications.

In some cases, the Israeli armed forces publicized the strikes either as early warnings or after the fact; in others, they were not publicized at all and were only detected by researchers using satellite imagery and ground-truth photos trickling out of Iran.

“It almost seems like an afterthought and lower priority to the war planners,” said Jim Lamson, a former Iran analyst for the CIA of 23 years who is now a visiting fellow at the Department of War Studies with King’s College London and senior research associate at the California-based Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

“To me, it doesn’t look like a real robust CBW-specific campaign,” he said, using the acronym for chemical and biological weapons.

Many of the sites that were struck, like the headquarters of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND) or the Malek Ashtar University of Technology, were hit for their roles in the nuclear and missile programs rather than their chemical and biological research, according to Israeli messaging.

This missing focus is not without reason: The chemical and biological threat from Iran may simply not be what some pundits have long made it out to be, Lamson said.

And it’s in line with the U.S. government’s own longstanding assessment. While Washington has warned that Tehran has long dabbled in research regarding these weapons of mass destruction, there has not been talk of any significant arsenal, stockpile or deployment capability for these tools in decades.

Iran is also a full member of both the Biological and the Chemical Weapons conventions. Defensive research – such as manufacturing agents to develop countermeasures and antidotes – is permitted under both pacts, though the line between defensive and offensive applications is blurry.

While the U.S. government in its own publications has repeatedly declared Iran non-compliant with its CWC obligations, Washington has for decades not outright accused Tehran of stockpiling an arsenal of chemical weapons. Instead, since the early 2000s, the State Department and CIA have softened the language to say that Iran “maintains the capability to produce CW agents.”

In its annual compliance reports, the U.S. has focused on historical transfers to Libya in the 1970s and 1980s, failure to fully declare its holdings of riot-control agents – which are illegal as a weapon of war, but legal for domestic use – and what it calls the incomplete declaration of production facilities. In 2024, it added that Iran had allegedly weaponized pharmaceutical-based agents such as fentanyl.

Others in the think-tank world have persistently described Iran’s program as a real threat that should be addressed. In a memo penned days before U.S. President Donald Trump launched attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies highlighted the continued concerns with Iran’s research and access to chemical weapons, including the threat that they may be proliferated to its proxies in the region or used against its own people to crush uprisings.

Andrea Stricker, the foundation’s nonproliferation program deputy director, also cited intelligence assessments from the mid-2000s that suggested Iran had maintained an undeclared stockpile of chemical weapons.

Lamson has been tracking the Iranian sites involved in these programs since before the first waves of strikes in 2025, in which a handful of them were destroyed, but many more were left unharmed.

The Iranian chemical and biological programs, he said, were likely intended to maintain a “threshold capability” similar from its pre-war nuclear stance: having the dual-use industries and research established so that if Iran made the decision to manufacture the weapons, the breakout time would be relatively short.

But, at present, “this does not look like a dedicated offensive CBW program with production, agents and delivery systems to me,” he said.

Within Iran, the threat perception that the U.S. or Israel – which is not a signatory of the Biological Weapons Convention and has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention – may use these weapons of mass destruction against Iran is very real.

It’s a deep-seated fear, rooted in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, during which Iraq, at the time supported by many Western countries and using Western-imported gear, launched thousands of chemical attacks against both Iranian soldiers and civilians. More recently, senior government officials in Tehran have alleged Western biological warfare against government targets in statements ranging from fearful to conspiratorial and often conveniently timed to distract from domestic failings.

As a result of the perceived threat, some factions in Iran’s government have pushed for a more active development of chemical and biological capabilities, and a broader consensus on maintaining capable defensive research abilities exists within the relevant policy elites.

What results is a latent capability, in the form of disparate institutes and industrial sites, that have some chemical and biological weapons applications, but no centralized, large-scale BWC program.

The lack of prominence in the shifting explanation for the war is puzzling, argues Lamson.

“If the U.S. and Israel really had concerns over chemical and biological weapons, like they’ve said over the years, why wasn’t it a stated threat, a justification, leading up to it?” he asked. In both the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003, Lamson pointed out, the military and even Israeli civilians had been equipped with gas masks and other gear to mitigate CBW attacks coming their way.

“Unless it was done very quietly, we haven’t seen that in this instance, which to me, again, reflects the fact that Israel and the U.S. for whatever reason, weren’t that concerned that there were going to be actual CW and BW used against them,” Lamson said.

The most serious incident occurred at 3:43 a.m. on March 25, when a drone crossing Estonian airspace from Russia struck the chimney of the Auvere power station in the eastern Ida-Viru County − located less than 50 kilometers from the Russian port of Ust-Luga, which Ukraine was striking overnight. No one was injured and the plant’s power output was not affected, Estonian energy company Enefit Power said. But the incident was enough to trigger an emergency government session in Tallinn and a nationwide alarm alert that caused confusion when it failed to specify the affected region.

The Director General of the Estonian Internal Security Service, Margo Palloson, confirmed it was “indeed a drone of Ukrainian” origin, and Estonia’s foreign minister stressed it “was not directed at Estonia.”

Estonian Defense Forces Commander Lt. Gen. Andrus Merilo said investigators were working to determine what type of drone hit the plant, but he was unambiguous about its payload. “We can say with fairly high confidence that it was not a reconnaissance drone, but rather an explosive-laden device — either an attack drone or a decoy drone,” he told reporters.

Earlier the same night, a drone entered Latvian airspace from Russia and detonated in the Krāslava region in southeastern Latvia at around 2:30 a.m., according to Latvian military authorities. Latvian Deputy Chief of Joint Staff Egils Leščinskis said the object was detected by radar roughly ten minutes before impact. “The aircraft most likely veered off course or was affected by electromagnetic warfare measures,” he said.

On Monday night, a Ukrainian drone had already come down in the Varena district of southeastern Lithuania, near the Belarusian border, following a separate attack on Primorsk − Russia’s other major Baltic oil port, which had been burning for over two days by Wednesday. Lithuanian authorities confirmed the drone had flown over Belarus before crashing.

It’s not clear why these Ukrainian drones are now repeatedly falling on Western territory rather than reaching their intended Russian targets, but Russian GPS jamming and spoofing have been singled out as a likely cause by officials and analysts. Russian transmitters are known to block and falsify Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals, such as those from the GPS and European Galileo satellite constellations. This can cause drones to lose track of their location or even veer off course when the systems on board are fed falsified location information.

“It’s electronic warfare with the aim of preventing being hit by things that use satellite navigation – drones,” Ralf Ziebold of the German Aerospace Center DLR previously told Defense News for an investigation that geolocated the origin of these signals.

It’s unclear whether Russia is actively redirecting drones to NATO countries or whether the incursions are simply a byproduct of EW defenses protecting key infrastructure and assets on Russian soil. Western officials so far have described the incidents as accidents.

In addition to electronic warfare, the distances at play are huge: Some of the targets Ukrainian drones were intending to strike were up to 1,000 kilometers from Ukrainian territory, making these some of the longest-distance strikes Ukraine has conducted. These long flights can magnify minor navigational errors.

Russian media, heavily controlled by the Kremlin, have reported that the Baltic States have opened their air spaces for the overflight of Ukrainian drones on their way to strike targets in the Leningrad oblast. The claim, which was picked up by Russian state-owned TV channel Rossiya 1, appears to have originated from Mash, one of the most widely read Russian-language Telegram channels.

None of the three drones was intercepted by the Baltic states’ or allied air defense systems. The EDF commander acknowledged that engaging drones near the Russian border is legally and tactically constrained. “Our goal is to avoid any unintended escalation, so we certainly cannot engage drones where there is even the slightest risk that our actions could carry over into Russian territory,” Merilo said.

The incidents follow a growing number of drone incursions along the eastern flank. In July 2025, Lithuania recorded two incursions by Russian-origin Gerbera drones crossing from Belarus − the second of which was found at the Gaižiūnai military training ground carrying approximately two kilograms of explosives, some 100 kilometers inside NATO territory. In August, Ukrainian drone fragments were found near Elva in south-central Estonia after a night of Ukrainian strikes on Russian inland targets. The following month, Latvia recovered Gerbera fragments on a western beach.

That accumulation of incidents has sharpened allied frustration. “These are the effects of Russia’s full-scale war of aggression. We can assume that we will see more such incidents,” said Margo Palloson, director general of Estonia’s Internal Security Service.

Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina drew a connection with Western capitals’ preoccupation with the war against Iran: the attacks on Ukraine and their spillover were intensifying “at a time when the attention of the West has been diverted by events in the Middle East,” she said.

Latvian Defense Minister Andris Sprūds cut short a visit to Kyiv, where he had been delivering drones to Ukrainian forces, to return home. Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys said Vilnius had opened talks with Kyiv. None of the governments signaled any intent to invoke Article 4 or 5, and all three publicly attributed the drone incidents to the spillover of Russia’s war.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi addressed the incidents at a press conference, stating that Kyiv is in close contact with its partners to clarify all details and that such incidents “have been occurring regularly” in the Baltic states.

The incursions show that the Baltic states’ air defenses may still be unprepared to tackle modern drone threats and raise questions about whether Russia is deliberately redirecting Ukrainian drones to Western states, or whether the incidents can be chalked up as collateral. With Ukraine striking deep into Russia and targeting the Leningrad Oblast along corridors that pass directly over or near the Baltics in particular, more incidents of the Baltic states inadvertently ending up in the crossfire of the war in Ukraine seem likely.

A Shahed-type unmanned aerial vehicle reportedly struck the British base’s runway a few minutes past midnight on March 2, causing what the U.K. Ministry of Defence described as “minimal damage” with no reported casualties. Two additional drones targeting the base were intercepted on March 2, according to Cypriot authorities.

The strike is widely believed to have been carried out by Iran or Iranian-backed proxies in retaliation for U.S. operations conducted from British bases in Cyprus in support of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. In state media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also threatened to strike Cyprus with ballistic missiles.

Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias announced the deployment of the FDI HN frigate Kimon − described as the most advanced vessel in the Hellenic Navy and the only one capable of providing long-range air defense − alongside a second frigate, identified in regional media as the Psara, which is equipped with Greece’s domestically developed Centaur counter-drone system and can detect UAVs at ranges up to 150 kilometers. Four F-16s have since landed in Cyprus, Cypriot government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis confirmed on X, formerly Twitter.

The Greek government had previously announced that a “pair” of F-16s was sent to Cyprus.

Reporting by Cypriot media also said a Greek C-130 Hercules transport plane had arrived on the eastern Mediterranean island by Monday evening.

Greece and Cyprus have long maintained close ties, including in the military space. Athens has served as a protective power for Cyprus since the end of Turkey’s military intervention that led to the island’s partition. Dendias, who traveled to Cyprus to coordinate directly with Cypriot Defense Minister Vasilis Palmas, said Greece would support Cyprus “in every possible way” throughout the crisis.

Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, meanwhile, maintained that his country “does not participate in any way and does not intend to be part of any military operation.”

In addition to Greece, the U.K. appears to be set to send one of its own warships capable of intercepting ballistic missiles to the region, The Times of London reported.

British and Turkish government officials officials did not respond to a request for comment in time for the publication of this article.

“We can confirm that attacks took place yesterday and today on the multinational military bases in Erbil, Iraq, and Al Azraq, Jordan,” the Operational Command of the German Armed Forces said in a Sunday statement, adding “air defense measures” had been activated.

The German soldiers based there were relocated into air raid shelters and were unharmed, the command’s statement continued.

Other countries known to have recently been based in Erbil include Norway, Sweden, Italy, France, Hungary and the Netherlands, though some troops were relocated ahead of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.

In their initial statements, European nations were emphatic that they did not participate in the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, although they simultaneously did not downplay their dislike for the Iranian regime.

The first European Union statement on Saturday reiterated that the Union was opposed to Iran’s “murderous regime” and had placed sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the EU also recently designated a terrorist organization. The EU called for “maximum restraint” and stressed the importance of nonproliferation and its longstanding preference for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis.

“For regional security and stability, it is of the utmost importance that there is no further escalation through Iran’s unjustified attacks on partners in the region,” Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission’s president, said on X, formerly Twitter. She scheduled a high-level meeting to discuss the situation for Monday, two days after the initial attacks.

Although European nations were not involved in the initial strikes on Iran, their direct involvement in the crisis remains possible, given that European assets and missions are scattered across the region.

The EU’s Operation Aspides naval mission, which protects shipping in the Red Sea against strikes from Houthi rebels in Yemen, was extended for another year last week, and is set to receive a reinforcement of two French warships, bringing the total to five. The mission’s mandate was due to expire on Feb. 28, the day that the regional war began.

On Monday morning, news broke that an Iranian drone had struck the British Royal Air Force base Akrotiri on the island of Cyprus, per The Guardian. This came just hours after the U.K. government had decided to grant U.S. forces access to its bases for strikes on Iran. No casualties and only “limited” damage were reported. The two large military base areas in the south of Cyprus − Akrotiri and Dhekelia − are considered sovereign British overseas territories.

Meanwhile, the French foreign ministry on Monday rejected chatter on X that the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier was being sent to the Eastern Mediterranean.

European governments estimate that tens of thousands of their citizens are in the region, also owing to the United Arab Emirates’ popularity as a destination, residence and stopover location. Spain and Germany each estimate over 30,000 of their citizens are currently in the Middle East.

A Notice to Airmen (NOTAM), verified by the Bulgarian investigative outlet Obektivno.BG, showed the airport restricted non-military operations on Feb. 23 from 01:15 to 02:50 local time and again on Feb. 24 from 01:05 to 03:35. Commercial flights are not ordinarily scheduled during this time frame.

Airport authorities attributed the brief closures to routine runway repairs and explicitly denied any link to the American military presence.

Photographs circulating on social media showed at least six KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft from the 6th Air Refueling Wing at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, along with C-17 and C-130 cargo planes and Boeing 747s typically used for troop transport, parked at the airport’s Terminal 1, according to Obektivno.BG.

Bulgaria’s Ministry of Defense confirmed the U.S. Air Force presence, describing the deployment as support for “training related to NATO’s enhanced vigilance activities,” with American personnel engaged solely in aircraft maintenance. Caretaker Foreign Minister Nadezhda Neynsky acknowledged her ministry had limited information and had ordered officials to collect additional details.

The Sofia staging is a small part of a much larger American military mobilization. The Bulgarian investigative journalists have tracked more than 120 U.S. Air Force aircraft that crossed the Atlantic within days, including four dozen F-16s, three squadrons of F-35A stealth fighters, and 12 F-22 Raptors.

Similar deployments, including F-22s staged at RAF Lakenheath, preceded last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group is also en route to join the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is already positioned in the Arabian Sea.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has refused to grant Washington permission to use two critical British-controlled installations − RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, the European forward base for U.S. heavy bombers including the B-2 and B-52, and the joint US-UK facility at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean − for any potential strike on Iran, The Times of London reported.

The buildup coincides with high-stakes nuclear diplomacy. American President Donald Trump, speaking at the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace on Feb. 19, said he had given Tehran roughly ten days to reach a nuclear agreement, warning that “bad things will happen” if talks collapse. U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met an Iranian delegation in Geneva last week, with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi describing agreement on a set of “guiding principles,” though significant gaps remain between the two sides.

Bulgaria, a NATO member since 2004, maintains a Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington signed in 2006 that permits U.S. forces to use Bulgarian military facilities.

Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, announced it would send an expeditionary group of soldiers to Greenland along with “further European countries” in a short statement late on Wednesday. Sweden, Norway and France, too, have confirmed they have ordered soldiers to the Arctic island.

Additionally, the Netherlands and Canada will be deploying forces to the Danish territory in the high North, officially to take part in a planned NATO military exercise, Operation Arctic Endurance.

The operation does not appear to have any publicly communicated start or end dates, atypical for NATO exercises, which are usually communicated well in advance. There does not appear to be an online record of an operation by that name being publicly discussed prior to Jan. 14. A search of the NATO website similarly returned no results.

Denmark, whose realm the self-administered territory is a part of, had previously announced it would “immediately” bolster its defenses there.

European capitals have been scrambling to make sense of the martial rhetoric out of the White House and find a potential route for de-escalation by touting their efforts to boost Arctic defenses against Russian and Chinese ships around Greenland. They have appealed to U.S. leaders to respect Danish sovereignty while boosting Arctic defenses under a joint NATO push.

At the same time, they have reaffirmed their commitment to Denmark’s territorial integrity, and the EU has said it is looking at potential countermeasures behind closed doors.

The German government initially said 13 Bundeswehr soldiers would depart for Nuuk aboard an A400M transport plane and remain there through Jan. 17. The plans changed on Thursday, with Germany saying its expeditionary team would now fly to Denmark instead and go from there to Greenland aboard a civilian aircraft on Friday, together with Danish forces.

“The aim is to explore the framework conditions for possible military contributions to support Denmark in ensuring security in the region,” the Bundeswehr said in its nocturnal press statement on Wednesday, “for example, for maritime surveillance capabilities.”

On Thursday, the German defense ministry said “specific skill contributions are not yet the focus” of the mission and that, instead, “the task is to gather fundamental insights into the local conditions for deployment and training opportunities” in preparation for further talks and planning within NATO.

In the latest statement, German Minister of Defense Pistorius also called out an alleged threat by Russia and China in the Arctic, in an apparent olive branch to the United States.

Danish officials have pushed back against the U.S. assertion that the waters around Greenland are swarming with Russian and Chinese vessels.

Pistorius had previously name-checked the country’s brand-new P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft in the context of a discussion about Greenland and protecting the high North.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson confirmed that Stockholm, too, had sent soldiers to Greenland as early as Wednesday, although the government maintains they were dispatched to “prepare for upcoming elements within the framework of the Danish exercise Operation Arctic Endurance.”

Both Sweden and Germany said Denmark had requested that the allied countries’ armed forces be sent.

Norway has confirmed two military service members have been sent to Greenland “to map out the ‍further cooperation between (NATO) allies,” ‍Tore Sandvik, Oslo’s defense minister, said in an email to Reuters.

French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed his country’s sending of troops 18 minutes past midnight local time on Thursday, saying on X that “at the request of Denmark, I have decided that France will participate in the joint exercises organized by Denmark in Greenland.” At the time, he said that “the first French military elements are already on their way. Others will follow.”

On Wednesday, representatives of Greenland, Denmark, and the United States met at the White House, but the meeting failed to resolve the standoff.

“We agreed to disagree,” Danish foreign minister Lars Lökke Rasmussen told reporters after the “frank but constructive” talks concluded. He said there was a “fundamental disagreement” between Copenhagen and Washington about the future of the world’s largest island.

The countries agreed to create a high-level working group tasked with finding a common path forward, while Trump reiterated his intention for the U.S. to take possession of the island after the meeting concluded.

Governments here are pouncing on an opening in the rhetoric from the White House, where Vice President J.D. Vance has presented an ostensible neglect in Europeans securing Greenland as the main driver in the Trump administration’s push to acquire the island, which is a territory of Denmark.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly proffered the idea of the United States taking over Greenland on account of its geostrategic location for U.S. homeland defense, by military force if necessary − a move that would be unprecedented among NATO alliance members.

New efforts by governments here now seem to be aimed at boosting Europe’s and Denmark’s footprint in and around Greenland in the spirit of assuaging U.S. concerns, effectively giving the American partner no reason for going rogue.

Talk has been loud among European policy elites that a NATO Arctic mission modeled on the alliance’s Baltic Sentry project might be forthcoming. The idea has been discussed by top-level officials from Germany, the U.K., France, Belgium and other European NATO countries, mostly behind closed doors. Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken was the first official to publicly call for the creation of such a mission earlier this month.

Germany’s counterpart, Boris Pistorius, announced prospects for a stronger European NATO presence in the Arctic on Jan. 13 during a meeting with EU foreign policy and defense chief Kaja Kallas in Berlin. He specifically referenced a possible NATO mission called “Arctic Sentry,” though he cautioned that this would require a NATO framework and “that cannot be ready in the next four weeks or, in my estimation, even three months,” he said.

Until then, he said, key European NATO nations agreed they will need to send clear signals that the continent was stepping up to better defend the Arctic territory together with the U.S.

The U.S. military already has a base on Greenland, currently housing 150 troops in Pituffik who are mainly devoted to ballistic missile early warning and space surveillance. That number is down from well over a thousand troops previously deployed under a still-valid contract with Denmark that has allowed Washington to establish bases and move military assets at will on the Arctic Island since 1951 and for as long as NATO exists.

Alliance officials insist there has been no decision made yet to create an Arctic Sentry mission. Speaking at a Swedish security conference over the weekend, Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said that while all Arctic operations had been merged under Joint Force Command Norfolk last month, it was premature to assume that the alliance would launch a dedicated mission.

Despite the newfound urgency from European capitals, Arctic defense is hardly new on the radar of treaty organization officials, with the region’s existing and growing strategic importance being well-known for decades and NATO forces working in and around Greenland since the Cold War.

In that vein, NATO had a “very good discussion” on the topic of Arctic security in the summer of last year, and the alliance is now working on the next steps, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said at the Global Europe Forum in Brussels on Jan. 13. He said security in the high north was already raised by Trump in his first term, with sea lanes opening up, and Russia and China being more active.

“It’s not for peaceful purposes, they’re not studying the seals and the polar bears,” Grynkewich said, referring to Russian and Chinese vessels in the area. “They’re out there doing bathymetric surveys and trying to figure out how they can counter NATO capabilities on and under the sea. So that’s something that could grow very quickly, and we need to be mindful of it and ready.”

“In NATO, we all agree that when it comes to the protection of the Arctic, we have to work together, and that’s exactly what we are doing,” Rutte said. That goes beyond the seven NATO members that border the Arctic, he noted, citing comments by the United Kingdom and Germany on their willingness to keep the region safe.

Rutte also cited Denmark’s investment in Boeing P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, long-range drones, F-35s and air-to-air refueling, saying all of those are capabilities for defending the country, NATO and the Arctic region as a whole.

Any NATO presence in the region would include a package combining manned platforms, such as frigates, with unmanned technologies like drones, a NATO official told Defense News on Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. However, the official noted that integrating these types of technologies in the harsh conditions found in an Arctic environment will be significantly more challenging than in the Baltic or Mediterranean seas.

Meanwhile, one Danish lawmaker challenged Trump’s characterization of threats to Greenland, specifically refuting his claims about Chinese and Russian ships in the region. The pushback by Stine Bosse, a Danish member of the European Parliament, centers on Trump’s Jan. 11 statement that Greenland “is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”

In conversation with Mark Rutte days later, Bosse said there was “not one single Chinese or Russian ship around Greenland, let that be stated as a fact.”

One of the Trump administration’s key talking points to justify its threats to seize Greenland has been that Denmark is unable to adequately defend its autonomous territory in the high north.

To many Europeans, the most urgent threat to Greenland right now seems not to be China, Russia or North Korea but rather their longtime ally in the form of the United States.

The people of Greenland are “scared stiff, they’re stressed and they’re more than just worried,” Bosse told Rutte in Brussels. And they overwhelmingly reject annexation by the United States: A mere six percent of Greenlanders were in favor when asked in an early 2025 poll.

“Nothing about Greenland without Greenland,” Greenland’s Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt told reporters while speaking in Denmark earlier this week. And Greenland has chosen to side with Denmark, in no uncertain terms.

“We are now facing a geopolitical crisis, and if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark,” Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said while speaking alongside Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen on Tuesday. “We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU,” he added.

Speaking in Berlin yesterday, the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas suggested there were ongoing discussions behind closed doors on what concrete measures were available to counter the threats from the United States.

“The least we can say is that would be a really unprecedented situation in the history of NATO and the history of any defense alliance in the world,” added Pistorius, referring to a situation in which the Trump administration would follow through and take over Greenland one way or another.

And while the 1951 agreement between Washington and Copenhagen on U.S. troops on the island remains active, so too is a Danish standing order from the same period that requires the country’s troops to open fire even without orders if foreign troops were to try and capture Greenland.