Overview
- President Donald Trump arrived in Ankara on Tuesday and was formally greeted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before summit meetings with NATO leaders and a planned bilateral with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
- NATO used a defence‑industry forum on the summit’s sidelines to announce multinational projects including Saab GlobalEye surveillance aircraft, Airbus refuellers and Triton surveillance drones to show higher spending is turning into weapons and capacity.
- Allies are being pressed to present clear plans to reach a new alliance target of 5% of GDP for defence by 2035 as part of a broader ‘NATO 3.0’ push to shift conventional defence responsibility toward Europe.
- Leaders are negotiating multiyear support for Ukraine with reporting that Europe aims to sustain roughly €70 billion a year for 2026–27 and to boost air‑defence production and licence arrangements.
- The summit tests U.S. signals from a Pentagon force‑posture review that is reducing some NATO‑assigned assets, and a failure to convince Washington could accelerate European production efforts and deepen political strains within the alliance.