NATO Leaders Converge on Ankara With Ukraine's Future and Trump's Demands on the Agenda

ANKARA, NATO heads of state and government arrive in Ankara on Monday for a two-day summit that will press the alliance on the hardest question it faces: whether commitments made in communiqués can be converted into the military reality needed to check Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.

All 32 allies are represented at the Beştepe Presidential Complex, the hilltop compound on the western edge of the Turkish capital that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made the centrepiece of his government's image. According to a briefing note published by the Congressional Research Service, Secretary General Mark Rutte has set out three core priorities for the gathering: sustaining allied defence investment, bolstering transatlantic defence industrial production, and continued support for Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is attending as an invited guest, not as a member. Rutte confirmed the invitation in May after a foreign ministers' meeting in Sweden, telling journalists simply: 'I invited him already. He will be there.' The framing carries its own significance. As analysts writing for the International Crisis Group noted ahead of the summit, European members' immediate concern is less what to do about Ukraine than whether President Donald Trump might disrupt the intended show of unity.

The membership question that animated NATO summits in Washington in 2024 has largely receded. According to analysis published by the Atlantic Council's Ambassador Daniel Fried in Just Security, the 2025 NATO summit declaration made no mention of Ukraine's potential membership at all, a retreat from the Washington declaration's language that 'Ukraine's future is in NATO.' Zelenskyy arrives in Ankara to press a different case: that the gap between what the alliance has provided and what Ukraine needs to shift the operational balance remains significant.

On the spending side, the numbers look substantial. According to the Congressional Research Service's pre-summit report, NATO estimates published in March showed that all 32 allies met the 2% of GDP benchmark in 2025, compared with just three allies when the Wales pledge was adopted in 2014. Rutte has pointed to a combined $1.2 trillion in additional European and Canadian defence spending from 2016 to 2026, including a $139 billion increase between 2024 and 2025 alone.

But analysts from the Centre for European Policy Analysis, cited by The New Voice of Ukraine, have cautioned that Ankara is unlikely to produce a grand strategic reset. The summit will be judged, they argued, not by declarations of unity but by 'whether NATO can turn its commitments into the forces, industrial capacity and digital resilience needed to deter Russia.'

That tension runs through almost every conversation in the corridors here. Trump's position is layered. The administration coined the phrase 'NATO 3.0', a stronger European pillar, less dependent on Washington, but with the United States 'firmly rooted,' in Rutte's formulation. In practice, the Congressional Research Service notes, U.S. force reductions in Eastern Europe have rattled allies: in May, the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees said they were 'very concerned by the decision to withdraw a brigade from Germany.'

There is a further complication that few allies wanted to add to the agenda. The war in Iran, which began in late February when the United States and Israel launched strikes against the Islamic Republic, has exposed a fault line. According to Euronews, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the foreign ministers' meeting in Sweden in May to make clear that Trump would personally express his 'disappointment' to leaders at Ankara that European allies did not join the campaign. That friction has not been resolved ahead of the summit.

Türkiye, for its part, is playing host with unmistakable relish. It's the second time Ankara has held a NATO summit, the first having been in Istanbul in 2004. The country brings NATO's second-largest military and, as the International Crisis Group noted, the decisive invocation of the Montreux Convention that closed the Bosphorus to Russian warships after the 2022 invasion, a move that forced much of Russia's Black Sea fleet command from Crimea to Novorossiisk on the Russian mainland.

South Korea's President Lee is also in Ankara, attending an Indo-Pacific leaders' session alongside Japan, Australia and New Zealand, according to reporting cited by Modern Diplomacy. The presence reflects what has become a standing feature of recent NATO gatherings: the argument that European and Asian security are no longer separable, reinforced by North Korea's reported military support for Russia.

The summit closes on Wednesday. A communiqué is expected. Whether it contains anything that changes the operational picture in eastern Ukraine, or simply papers over the alliance's internal fractures one more time, is the question Ankara still can't answer.

Sources cited:
- Congressional Research Service / Congress.gov (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R49018)
- International Crisis Group (https://www.crisisgroup.org/qna/europe-united-states-turkiye-ukraine/ukraine/what-expect-nato-summit)
- Just Security (Ambassador Daniel Fried, Atlantic Council) (https://www.justsecurity.org/144465/will-trump-take-the-win-at-natos-ankara-summit/)
- The New Voice of Ukraine (https://english.nv.ua/opinion/nato-ankara-summit-2026-from-promises-to-deterrence-50620070.html)
- Euronews (https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/05/22/ukraines-president-zelenskyy-invited-to-nato-summit-in-ankara-rutte-confirms)
- Modern Diplomacy (https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/07/03/south-koreas-lee-heads-to-nato-summit-mongolia-to-boost-defence-ties/)
- NATO.int (https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/2026/07/overview---2026-nato-summit-in-ankara-)