Italy's defence chief says pulling US help from Kyiv will only encourage Putin
The story
Italy's defence minister, Guido Crosetto, has broken ranks with Washington in unusually blunt terms. He says the Trump administration is making a serious error by scaling back its support for Ukraine, especially the intelligence that Kyiv relies on to spot and stop Russian attacks.
In his view, that kind of help is basic. Take it away and you take away a country's ability to protect itself. He argues the war only ends when Vladimir Putin accepts he can't gain any more ground. If Moscow sees the US stepping back, Crosetto says, it will read that as weakness and keep going.
The comments land in a tense week. President Trump announced what he called an energy ceasefire on Sunday, but Ukraine says Russian strikes on its power grid carried on within hours. Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Washington of using intelligence sharing as leverage to stop Ukrainian hits on Russian oil sites, a claim Trump denies. A group of senators from both parties is also pushing for an inquiry into a slowdown of Starlink service at the front earlier this month.
European leaders have mostly closed ranks around Zelensky. Hearing it this plainly from Italy, one of America's closer allies under Giorgia Meloni, shows how worried Europe is getting about where US policy is headed.
