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Meet the New Leader of the Free World, The New York Times, April 26, 2026. Credit…Leon Neal/Getty Images

Today, a number of noteworthy things happened.

Among them, at the top of the news, was a shooting incident at the White House Correspondent’s dinner in Washington, D.C., last night. The shooter, now in custody, was stopped by the Secret Service before being able to enter the ballroom, thankfully, where the dinner was being held, and where President Trump and others were gathered. The very possibility of attempted violence against the president of the United States, much less the vice president, speaker of the house (the next two positions in the line of succession) and many others, including many mainstays of the press in America, is loathsome. The response of the Secret Service was admirable, as it should be, as this is their job. The pre-event security arrangement of not having the entrance to the Hotel secured, is incomprehensible.

President Trump had refused to attend the dinner, the first president to do so, until this year. The news of the shooting incident has been covered full-time since, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. It should be at the top of the news, at least at first. At the same time, the full-time coverage has been an exemplar of what is too often the worst characteristic of the press. In this case of course, it was also self-focused. Most of the coverage has been an endless repetition of covering details, beyond the facts of the shooting scene itself, that have no significance until an authoritative investigation occurs. It has the effect of knee-jerk sensationalism to get and keep eyeballs fixed for ratings and advertising dollars.

This demeans the critical importance of any threat against a sitting president of the United States.

It also deflects from focusing on other important news.

Another story well deserving coverage was the fact that today is the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown, when virtually all of Europe and perhaps the planet could have been considerably devastated by radiation equalling that caused by nuclear war of various levels. Blind luck, and a small number of brave people stopped this outcome, many with their lives. It was also a milestone in the disintegration of a system–the Soviet Union–that created the circumstances under which the meltdown could happen.

Located in Ukraine, Chernobyl is now part of the backdrop of the war of aggression by Russia, the Soviet successor, well into its fifth year.

A year ago in February, impossibly, Russia hit the shield of the reactor with a drone, clearly to imply a threat to all of Europe. It had the opposite of the intended effect.

The EU earmarked over a hundred billion Euros for Ukraine and probably at least as much and more to follow. And the nations of Europe began to move further and faster than ever before in their own defence build-ups.

Once again, Keith Blume and Clara Lippert are currently in Ukraine, visiting, supporting, learning and continuing to film for ongoing documentaries on the subject.

The changes that have happened since they were here last fall and after the brutal winter war crime attacks on civilian infrastructure, are in some ways astounding, a word that is a continual hallmark of this war, and linked to the world at large, moving at an unimaginable speed of historic change.

The restoration of democracy to Hungary by the overhwhelming majority of the Hungarian people, has been a game changer, unlocking EU support, with transfers of billions of euros to Ukraine for military and civilian needs, likely providing Ukraine with its basic requirments to fight the war for years, as it may need to, yet at the same time potentially having a crucial impetus on Russia being willing to end it.

The coalescing of the EU in building its own defense network, absent the US, including NATO, is changing everything on the global stage as nothing before since World War Two.

Ukraine is becoming its own defence industry hub, and the global expert in fighting modern war, with the lightening-speed evolution of drones at the center.

Our own reports will occur after our return.

In the meantime, today, in the Sunday New York Times article by David French, Meet the New Leader of the Free World, the most concise, powerful and illuminating piece we can think of to date on the current state of global affairs impacted by the war in Ukraine, outlines with stunning clarity how much everything has changed, and will contune to on the current trajectory, impacting Ukraine, the United States, Russia, China, all of Europe and all the world.

This article is posted below, along with an excellent report today about the Chernobyl anniversary and the war, and Friday’s front page article about the enormous financial EU support for Ukraine’s military and civilan needs commencing:

OPINION

DAVID FRENCH

Meet the New Leader of the Free World

April 26, 2026

By David French

Opinion Columnist

A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the western alliance, including in the war against Iran.

Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.”

If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.

Events on the ground and in world capitals are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. First, the strategic situation in the Ukraine war seems to have changed. Last week, Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and one of the most astute analysts of the war, wrote that Ukraine has largely stabilized the frontline in eastern Ukraine, deepened its coalition, isolated Russia diplomatically and developed an indigenous arms industry that makes it less dependent on external support.

It’s no longer accurate to think of Ukraine as a desperate underdog; it’s becoming an independent power. Even as it fights for its life against Russia, it’s reportedly reaching defense deals with the Gulf states and with the United States — and this time it’s Ukraine that’s providing military assistance.

In February 2025, Donald Trump mocked Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump said. In April 2026, Ukraine has enough cards left that it’s sharing them.

This might be difficult for many readers to grasp — given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy — but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the western world may well be the Ukrainian Army. While the precise numbers are classified, the Atlantic Council estimated in 2025 that Ukraine had roughly a million men and women under arms, the vast majority of whom serve in the ground forces.

America’s total force is larger than Ukraine’s, but to put the size of Ukrainian land forces in perspective, the combined size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is around 620,000. It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces — especially when it comes to combat with a great power.

No one should minimize Ukraine’s manpower issues (more recent estimates place its total number of active troops well below the million-body peak) or the fact that it has no nuclear weapons and Russia has thousands. But its army is still vast, and its military is the only western force that has fully adapted to modern drone warfare. Indeed, Ukraine is arguably the world’s leader in drone warfare.

Rapid change isn’t just occurring in Ukraine. Other developments across the western alliance show that European nations are working with shocking speed to free themselves from dependence on America.

France is expanding its nuclear arsenal and increasing its defense spending. It is even changing its nuclear doctrine to allow it to deploy nuclear-armed aircraft outside France.

Germany has approved a plan to spend up to a trillion euros on defense and infrastructure. It has also set the goal of creating the strongest military in Europe by 2039 (ironically enough, the 100-year anniversary of the German invasion of Poland).

Canada is enacting its own defense budget increases — with the added twist that it will be spending far less money on American weapons.

This decision mirrors larger European and allied trends. Our allies are increasing their defense budgets and decreasing their dependence on American technology. Just last week, for example, NATO procurement officials decided to replace aging American-made early warning aircraft with newer designs from Saab, a Swedish manufacturer, and Bombardier of Canada. Ukraine has signed deals and letters of intent to purchase potentially hundreds of advanced fighters from Sweden and France.

All of this is taking place after news reports that Denmark had been prepared to blow up airfields in Greenland if its fellow NATO member, the United States, attempted to invade.

Given these developments, is it any wonder that Zelensky has proposed a new defense arrangement for Europe if America keeps stepping back — an alliance between E.U. nations, plus non-E.U. powers like the United Kingdom, Norway, Turkey and Ukraine?

There are readers who will welcome these developments. Good, you might think. Europe should take primary responsibility for its own defense. But there is an immense difference between allies who step up to contribute their fair share to a cooperative alliance and nations who engage in a military buildup to replace American power, which they no longer trust.

I don’t think Americans fully appreciate the extraordinary cost of Trump’s bluster and blunders. It should go without saying, but once you threaten to invade an allied country, you don’t just place the existence of the alliance in jeopardy; you raise the possibility of allies turning into mortal enemies. You can also trigger the kind of insecurity and scramble for power that contributed to the start of World War I.

In practical terms, it’s hard to see how alienating American allies puts America first.

There’s certainly no military benefit. Americans have spent the last several weeks watching our president dismiss our European allies as irrelevant then rage at them for not helping American forces reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

By launching the war against Iran without seeking the help of (or even consulting) our European allies, we lost potential access to their advanced fighters and frigates, as well as to France’s carrier battle group. In this context, there is no such thing as addition by subtraction. We are not stronger when there are fewer forces that will deploy to our aid.

There’s no fiscal benefit, either. This may sound overly basic, but it needs to be said: If you break faith with your allies, you can’t count on them to come to your defense. And that means you have to spend more money to maintain the same level of deterrence.

That’s exactly what Trump is planning to do; he has submitted a roughly $1.5 trillion budget request for the U.S. military, a staggering 40 percent increase from this fiscal year.

And where is the economic benefit? On Friday, Fareed Zakaria published a piece in The Washington Post observing that European and other allied governments aren’t just attempting to achieve greater military independence from the United States; they’re also attempting to gain more financial independence. And even though they have serious differences with China, the primary beneficiary of a rift in European and American relations may well be … China.

Zakaria quotes a Chinese businessman who puts Trump’s catastrophic diplomatic blunders in perspective. “For us, Trump’s attack on Iran is less consequential than his threat to attack Greenland,” he said. “When he did that, to America’s oldest allies, I knew that Europe would not follow America’s approach to China.”

History has its hinge points, and here is one: On Friday night, Feb. 25, 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky released a brief video from Kyiv. He told the people of Ukraine that the government has not fled to safety in the west and that it intended to stand and fight.

“We are here,” Zelensky said. “We are in Kyiv. We are protecting Ukraine.”

When I visited Ukraine in 2023, I spoke to Ukrainian soldiers who told me that statement sent a jolt of electricity through Ukrainian lines. From that moment, they knew they would not surrender; they would stand.

In hindsight, that decision hasn’t just changed the course of Ukrainian history. Its ripple effects are extending across the globe.

Here’s another hinge point: the night of Nov. 5, 2024, when the American people returned Donald Trump to the White House. It’s now clear that Trump’s second term will cause generational damage to American alliances.

Given that Americans saw how Trump behaved in his first term and put him back in power anyway, it’s fair for Europeans to conclude that the rift isn’t with Trump alone; its also with a critical mass of Americans.

The European nations don’t have the luxury of blaming Trump’s re-election on inflation and the border — or presuming that the western alliance will be safe once Trump is gone. One of Trump’s most likely heirs, JD Vance, is arguably even more hostile to the western alliance and Ukraine than Trump is. After all, Vance recently said that one of the things he’s “proudest” of is the administration’s decision to stop buying weapons for Ukraine. How can we be trusted as an ally if only one political party is committed to fulfilling our commitments?

For the foreseeable future, America’s allies will reasonably fear that they may be one election away from abandonment and betrayal.

Politics abhors a vacuum. When America stepped back, other nations were bound to step forward.

While America is still the world’s most powerful nation and it remains (for now) in NATO, it is rapidly forfeiting its role as the leader of the free world. And while we have certainly made mistakes in that role, we did lead the NATO alliance to victory in its generations-long confrontation with the Soviet Union. And we did so without treading into another catastrophic world war.

But you cannot threaten the free world and lead it at the same time. No nation can match American might, but for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either. It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag). 

. . .

40 Years After the Meltdown, War Layers Another Disaster on Chernobyl

Ideas have been floated for how the contaminated zone could bring economic benefits to Ukraine. But for the foreseeable future, it will be an army-controlled security belt.

By Andrew E. Kramer and Evelina Riabenko

Photographs by Brendan Hoffman

Reporting from the Chernobyl exclusion zone

• April 26, 2026

Vines twirl through the broken windows of long-abandoned homes, where the detritus of lives interrupted by disaster are still scattered about: children’s shoes, dishes, coats hanging on pegs, all covered in lichen and dust.

The ghost towns of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine emptied of people after the catastrophic explosion and meltdown at the nuclear power plant there 40 years ago, on April 26, 1986. High levels of radiation mean humans may never live in them again.

But these towns served another purpose for Ukrainian soldiers who recently trained amid the ruins. The troops practiced defending the irradiated land against a repeat Russian attack, taking precautions to avoid the most radioactive areas. In February 2022, Moscow’s forces entered the zone on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and occupied it for five weeks.

During the exercise, soldiers crouched beside waterlogged, mold-covered walls, aiming their rifles. Others threw live grenades into homes, chipping walls already crumbling from dry rot. Their presence highlighted a reality in the Chernobyl zone: For the foreseeable future, it will be an army-controlled security belt along the border with Belarus, a Russian ally.

“Everything depends on security” in the zone today, said the commander of the battalion training in the area, who asked to be identified by only his nickname, Skif, in keeping with military protocol.

The explosion in 1986, set off by a safety test and exacerbated by design flaws, spewed fire and radioactive material into the air, in the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Two workers were killed in the initial explosion, over two dozen emergency responders and cleanup workers died in the three months after from radiation exposure, and some 200,000 people are believed to have been relocated from the area.

Over the years, the radioactive towns, villages, forests and swamps have posed quandaries for the authorities. The land could never be repopulated, they concluded, because of contamination from long-lingering isotopes, including plutonium.

But it could bring economic benefits. Ideas included using it as a storage area for other countries’ nuclear waste, as a test site for new generations of small modular reactors, as territory for solar farms and as a destination for so-called disaster tourism.

Now, everything, other than modest solar-farm development, is on indefinite hold. Tourists, who began showing up at the site 20 years ago, are not coming back anytime soon, said Shaun Burnie, the senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Ukraine. Chernobyl has become one disaster layered on another: war fought in a radioactive zone.

Russia’s invasion in 2022 harmed efforts to contain radiation in multiple ways. Moscow’s forces occupied the crippled nuclear power station and used it as a staging area for attacks on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, early in the war. Their heavy armored vehicles stirred up small amounts of radioactive dust. Weeks later, Russian troops were defeated in the battle for Kyiv, and they withdrew from Chernobyl.

More worrisome are longer-term war risks. Scientists cannot reach wells that measure groundwater radiation, lest they step on a land mine. Also owing to mines, firefighters cannot rush to extinguish wildfires that spread radiation in smoke. Foreign scientists who studied radiation in the environment have fled.

In February 2025, Russia flew an exploding Iranian-designed Shahed drone into the gigantic steel shell that encloses an older, rickety structure built over the ruined reactor shortly after the accident. That older structure, known as the sarcophagus, is at risk of collapsing and releasing radiation.

The drone explosion punched a hole in the $2.5 billion outer shell, called the New Safe Confinement, and started a fire that burned through material needed to maintain the airtight seal. No radiation was released, but the strike set back two decades of efforts to safely isolate the worst of Chernobyl’s radiation.

The attack came a day before the opening of the influential Munich Security Conference in Germany, a warning to Ukraine’s Western allies that the war could spread radiation to Europe, from Chernobyl or other nuclear sites.

It is unclear how the confinement structure can be repaired. To protect workers from radiation, it had been built away from the reactor and later moved on rails into position over it. Now, repair work will have to be done in the highly radioactive zone, possibly by cycling large numbers of workers through stints that cannot exceed 11 hours per year, to comply with safety rules.

40 Years Ago, a Nuclear Catastrophe at Chernobyl

Photographs from the first days of the Chernobyl disaster and of the aftermath years later show the response, the evacuation and the long-term consequences of the world’s worst nuclear accident.

April 26, 2026

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has estimated that repairs will cost $500 million, begin in 2028 and last four years. Foreign donors, including France and Britain, have so far pledged 70 million euros, or about $82 million, for urgent repairs. The Russian drone most likely cost no more than about $50,000.

On Sunday, Rafael Grossi, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters in Kyiv that he had spoken with Ukraine’s energy minister about the need to start work before 2028.

“We believe that the repairs should start as soon as possible,” Mr. Grossi said, “and that leaving the situation as is now is problematic.”

Easier to repair was a nearby solar farm that was struck by shrapnel from the drone. The 18 damaged panels were replaced.

Two solar plants are operating in the Chernobyl zone, and a third is under construction despite the war. They sell electricity for the grid using high-voltage transmission lines originally built for the reactors, and they provide backup power for cooling ponds for nuclear waste.

Solar farms, which are unaffected by radiation and are largely impervious to missile and drone attacks because they are dispersed over large areas, still have a viable future in the exclusion zone, said Yevgen Variagin, the chief executive of Solar Chernobyl. The company opened the first solar plant there in 2018.

Otherwise, the area around Chernobyl is now primarily a military site, fortified against attacks from the north toward Kyiv and against possible Russian sabotage of the reactor or waste-storage facilities.

Tank traps, which look like X’s made from steel beams, and coils of razor wire stretch out over fields in the zone. At military positions, paths are covered in nets to protect against drones.

These defenses are typical for much of the front line in Ukraine. Other military preparations are peculiar to the radiation zone.

To fight in this landscape, the Ukrainian Army took special precautions. It did not dig trenches or burrow bunkers into the ground, lest it expose soldiers to radiation in the soil. Instead, aboveground berms or bunkers were built into hills of fresh sand that was trucked in.

Looking like large yellow anthills, these now dot the landscape around the Chernobyl plant.

Soldiers patrol the ghost towns, where buildings are covered in moss and surrounded by mature trees, lost in a swirl of dense vegetation like ancient Mayan ruins.

In the recent exercise, soldiers with the 28th Regiment of the National Guard maneuvered amid abandoned homes with corroded corrugated-metal roofs and broken windows.

Though devoid of people, the area must be defended against further damage, said Skif, the commander.

Compared with destruction inflicted elsewhere in Ukraine, an attack that released more radiation at Chernobyl, he said, would be “on a completely different scale.”

Constant Méheut and Kim Barker contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014.

. . .

$106 Billion Loan Reflects E.U.’s View That Peace in Ukraine Is Far Away

Unlike previous European assistance packages, this one is heavily weighted toward military spending, meant to put Ukraine on solid footing for a long fight.

By Constant Méheut

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

April 23, 2026

For weeks, Ukraine had been caught in a bind. A path to ending the war seemed increasingly illusory, as peace talks with Russia went from yielding no results to being put on hold. That meant Kyiv needed to prepare to fight indefinitely, even as vital financial support from the European Union remained frozen.

On Thursday, a breakthrough finally arrived.

After Hungary dropped its opposition to a $106 billion E.U. loan to Ukraine the day before, European leaders unblocked the funds. The money, which had been held up since December, will cover a large share of Ukraine’s financial needs over the next two years. Once those funds are exhausted, an additional $117 billion from the bloc’s long-term budget is expected to be allocated to Ukraine.

Taken together, the pledges appear to put Ukraine on firmer financial footing at least through 2029, said Hlib Vyshlinsky, head of the Kyiv-based Center for Economic Strategy. The pressure, he added, now shifts to Moscow, which is facing growing economic challenges in sustaining its own war effort.

In addition to the loan, the European Union adopted its 20th package of economic sanctions against Russia on Thursday.

“Deadlock over,” Kaja Kallas, the E.U. foreign policy chief, wrote on social media. “Russia’s war economy is under growing strain, while Ukraine is getting a major boost.”

The European Union’s extended commitment to Ukraine has largely filled a void left by the Trump administration. Last year, European countries provided nearly all of Kyiv’s military, financial and humanitarian support, while U.S. aid fell by 99 percent, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research center.

Unlike previous E.U. assistance packages, the latest one is heavily weighted toward defense spending. Some $70 billion of the loan will go to the military, giving Kyiv a substantial pool of money to buy costly air defense systems and expand production of drones, its most effective tools for blunting Russian ground assaults.

The loan will allow Ukraine to better plan its military operations over the long term. It has seldom been able to do that, as previous assistance often arrived in dribs and drabs, consisting largely of equipment donations rather than funding that could be directed toward buying or producing the weapons Ukraine needs most.

“It matters that Ukraine is securing this level of financial certainty — after more than four years of full-scale war,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote in a social media post on Thursday.

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The emphasis on military financing reflects what many European and Ukrainian officials have expressed privately for months: that Ukraine must prepare for a prolonged war by strengthening its defenses.

Russia has refused to agree to a cease-fire, and the Trump administration, which has mediated peace talks, has not put significant pressure on Moscow to compromise.

The negotiations are now on ice as the United States has entangled itself in another Middle Eastern war. Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, has said that resuming negotiations is not Moscow’s top priority.

That comes as no surprise to European leaders. “The truth is, anyway, Russia has never taken them seriously,” Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, said about the talks last week. “This is why it is all the more important to support Ukraine.”

Mr. Zelensky has reshaped his cabinet to reflect the likelihood that the war will not end soon. He appointed a new defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, a tech enthusiast who has embraced drones as central to pushing back Russian forces.

While neither Russia nor Ukraine has any clear path to victory, Mr. Fedorov has said his mission is to make the fight futile for Moscow and compel a settlement.

“The president has given the Ministry of Defense a clear task: alongside diplomacy, strengthen our defense in such a way that we force the enemy into peace,” Mr. Fedorov said in a February statement outlining his blueprint.

The plan includes expanding air defense capabilities to protect Ukrainian skies, maximizing Russian losses on the battlefield and using long-range weapons to strike Russia’s revenue-generating oil industry.

The interest-free E.U. loan — which Ukraine would have to repay only if Russia paid reparations — will, in part, provide the financial foundation for Mr. Fedorov’s strategy.

The loan will be disbursed evenly over the next two years, with $33 billion allocated to military needs and $20 billion to nonmilitary expenses in the first year, according to Valdis Dombrovskis, the European commissioner for economy. He added that a first tranche of money was likely to arrive in Ukraine in late May or early June, to finance drone production.

Ukraine is producing nearly 1,000 interceptor drones, used to counter aerial weapons, each day, according to Mr. Zelensky. With the money, it could double that amount and better protect its skies, he said. “We need this money very much,” he told CNN. “It’s really a question of our life.”

The loan cements a shift from a model of military assistance relying on donations of equipment to one in which European countries finance Ukraine’s own weapons production.

As the war drags on, Kyiv has complained that weapons donated by the West, including guided artillery shells that proved vulnerable to electronic warfare, are no longer effective on a battlefield increasingly reshaped by modern technologies.

Instead, Ukraine has urged its allies to finance its booming domestic defense industry, which has produced cutting-edge weapons such as robot-like unmanned vehicles equipped with machine guns. This kind of technology is better suited to the new type of warfare that has emerged in Ukraine.

“This matters because many of the most relevant solutions — including interceptors, deep-strike capabilities, various types of drones and electronic warfare systems — are available either only in Ukraine, or at a significant cost advantage from Ukrainian producers and foreign companies operating in Ukraine,” said Nataliia Shapoval, head of the Kyiv School of Economics Institute.

Still, Ukraine remains dependent on powerful weapons produced only by other Western countries, including U.S.-made Patriot missiles, the only air defense system capable of shooting down ballistic missiles that Ukraine has in its arsenal.

Mr. Zelensky said on Thursday that the funds would be directed to Ukraine’s domestic arms production and to “the procurement of necessary weapons from partners that we do not yet produce in Ukraine.”

The country will also prioritize repairing and strengthening its energy sector ahead of next winter, Mr. Zelensky said. This past winter, Ukraine suffered greatly as Russia targeted its energy system.

Overall, the European Union said the new loan would cover about two-thirds of Ukraine’s external financing needs for military and nonmilitary spending for the next two years, which the bloc estimates at $135.7 billion. The remaining one-third is expected to be covered by other institutions like the I.M.F.

With the loan, Ukraine’s spending should be covered for the coming years, according to some Ukrainian and European officials. The reality, however, is more complicated.

Kyiv’s official budget projects $66 billion in military expenses this year. But the Ukrainian defense ministry said earlier this year that the country would need $120 billion to successfully implement its strategy to halt Russia’s assault.

To bridge the gap, the ministry said it was counting on additional assistance. Mr. Fedorov has been touring Western capitals to present his plan and seek more funding. Germany agreed to a new package of military aid worth more than $4.5 billion, while Belgium and Spain each committed $1.2 billion.

Constant Méheut is a New York Times correspondent, covering the war in Ukraine.

A version of this article appears in print on April 24, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: E.U. Loan To Kyiv Provides Lifeline For War Effort.

. . .