Developing: European leaders united around a $105 billion loan to keep Ukraine afloat financially on Friday after pausing a long-discussed proposal to use frozen Russian assets as Ukraine continues to face withering Russian drone and missile attacks following almost 1,400 consecutive days of war.
Kyiv is set to run out of money by April, and the European Commission was prepared to move ahead with the frozen Russian funds as a “reparations” plan for devastated Ukraine. An estimated $217 billion of $246 billion in frozen Russian central bank funds are held in Belgium at its Euroclear clearing house. But the Guardian reports Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stopped the plan, warning Moscow “would retaliate, and that courts in Russia-friendly jurisdictions, such as China, could order Belgian assets to be seized.”
Fiscal forecast: The EU’s $105 billion loan is about two-thirds of what Ukraine “is thought to need to stay afloat over the next two years,” the BBC reports.
Meanwhile, multiple European nations announced $45 billion in military aid for Ukraine after a meeting of the so-called Ramstein Group on Wednesday, the Kyiv Post reports.
Germany vowed more than $13 billion, including air-defense equipment as well as drones and artillery shells. The Brits, too, vowed additional air-defense assets and counter-drone systems. Canada announced $50 million in missiles and drone equipment and another $200 million in U.S. equipment to be purchased for Ukraine. The Dutch said they’ve set aside more than $800 million for drone equipment. Norway vowed to send missiles for Ukraine’s F-16 aircraft. Denmark vowed about $167 million for drones and air-defense. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal and the Czech Republic also vowed new military aid to Ukraine.
In case you were curious, “under Trump’s control, the US contributed a goose egg” at the Wednesday meeting, the Kyiv Post reports. Read more, here.
ICYMI: Three Russian border guards used a hovercraft to cross into Estonian territory on Wednesday. The encounter was reportedly brief, and seemed to be a test of Estonian responses, analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted in their Thursday assessment.
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Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1972, America’s last crewed flight to the moon, Apollo 17, returned to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
Trump 2.0
The U.S. military carried out its 26th known strike against alleged drug-trafficking boats around Latin America on Wednesday, Southern Command officials announced on social media that evening. The strike targeted a single boat and killed four people as they were traveling somewhere “along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific,” SOUTHCOM said with an accompanying video of the attack.
War crime in DOD’s boat strikes? Sen. Wicker sees none. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said Thursday after a classified briefing this week that SOUTHCOM’s war on maritime drug traffickers is being “conducted based on sound legal advice,” despite allegations to the contrary following Washington Post reporting the Pentagon killed two survivors after their initial strike on Sept. 2.
“I have seen no evidence of war crimes,” Wicker said in a statement Thursday. “After participating in the various briefings provided by the administration, I am confident that the strikes that have taken place thus far against narco-terrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of operations were conducted based on sound legal advice,” he said, and claimed, “Each strike has been preceded by a rigorous analysis of extensive intelligence, as well as a thorough legal review.”
Wicker’s Democratic counterpart at SASC disagreed, and said in his own statement Thursday that the committee “has been denied basic information, documents, and answers from the Department of Defense about this campaign.” To that end, Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the military has not yet provided several documents “required by existing law and the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026,” including:
- The relevant Execute Orders;
- Unedited video of all strikes;
- Updated legal and policy framework reports;
- All audio, transcripts, and chat logs between commanders, aircraft, and others from the Sept. 2nd attacks;
- Regular staff briefings;
- Responses to dozens of written follow-up questions; and
- Updated costs for SOUTHCOM’s Southern Spear campaign.
Reed and other SASC and HASC lawmakers were shown video of the Sept. 2 strikes on Wednesday after the Post’s reporting raised concern among experts and critics on Capitol Hill that the U.S. military had possibly violated the laws of war in a campaign of alleged extrajudicial killings. Several lawmakers want the video released so the U.S. public can view what their troops are doing as part of President Trump’s war on drug cartels.
Trump himself said he would be okay with releasing the full video. A few days later, however, he changed his mind and said, “Whatever [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth wants to do is OK with me.” Hegseth then told reporters Tuesday, “Of course we’re not going to release a top secret full unedited video of that to the general public.”
Sen. Chris Murphy disagreed with Hegseth’s characterization. “There’s nothing ‘top secret’ about the second strike if there wasn’t anything top secret about the first one,” said Murphy, D-Conn., and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writing on social media Thursday.
A note on strategy: The Pentagon’s counter-boat campaign developed only after the White House’s desired war on Mexican drug cartels turned up too few targets, the Post reported Thursday. Trump promised a war on those cartels during his 2024 campaign; but once he took office, at least some cartels responded and conditions reportedly changed—which caused the White House to change its focus. According to the Post, “as the administration surged thousands of U.S. troops to the southern border, increased U.S. surveillance flights and boosted intelligence sharing with its neighbor, Mexican military operations across the border curbed cartel action,” current and former U.S. officials said.”That left [Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller] and his team looking for another target.”
“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” a U.S. official said. The result was SOUTHCOM’s campaign targeting drug-trafficking boats off the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Latin America, which has killed at least 99 people to date, according to the U.S. military. Trump’s executive order for that campaign “contains targeting criteria lifted from the language of the counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which some current and former officials say give the Pentagon an overly permissive license to kill,” the Post reported, and notes, “The Pentagon has not publicly identified those killed, and it is unclear whether it has collected the intelligence to do so.” Continue reading, here.
Another consideration: “Trump’s Venezuela embargo could put Taiwan at risk,” Reuters reported Thursday after a think-tanker flagged a possible “propaganda opening” for China. “When Washington blurs terms, it weakens its ability to call out coercion elsewhere,” Craig Singleton, a China expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told Reuters. But he wasn’t alone.
“Ultimately, the U.S. is doing a lot of damage to the normative quality of the rules,” Isaac Kardon of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said. “That is a major blow to the credibility of international law to restrain other actors.” At least one other expert was not quite as concerned. Read more, here.
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Lastly this week: Review a list of 30 “conflicts to watch in 2026” via our Thursday podcast conversation with Paul Stares of the Council on Foreign Relations. This week, Stares published CFR’s latest annual Preventive Priorities Survey, which features input from hundreds of foreign policy experts ranking conflicts around the globe according to their likelihood and possible impact on U.S. policy for the year ahead.
One stark observation that we’d missed this past year: “Nine capital cities in the world have been attacked by other countries over the last 12 months,” Stares pointed out in the Thursday podcast. “Nine capital cities. And I would not have imagined, given the normative constraints on the use of force, that we would ever see that. It’s not just covert action or disinformation, it’s actually long-range bombardment from ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and drones.”
What might lie ahead? You can catch our 20-minute conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on our website.
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