As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its third year, European leaders expressed fear that a victory by former President Donald Trump in November would mean the fruition of his promise on Saturday to encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries not spending sufficiently on defense.

“Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement on Sunday.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said reneging on NATO commitments was “irresponsible and dangerous” and “solely in Russia’s interests,” at a Monday press conference alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was in Berlin and Paris to shore up Europe’s military cooperation.

Tusk, who has spent the 21st century helping build a united Europe, argued that the European Union should pursue its own military alliance in the wake of uncertainty that a second Trump term could produce.

“There is no reason why we should be so clearly militarily weaker than Russia, and therefore increasing production and intensifying our cooperation are absolutely indisputable priorities,” Tusk said, adding Trump’s remarks “should act like a cold shower for all those who continue to underestimate this increasingly real threat which Europe is facing.”

Poland, which shares a 130-mile border with the noncontiguous Russia Kaliningrad Oblast territory, has spent around 170 of the last 230 years with large swaths of its territory under the control of Russian occupiers. Unlike Ukraine, Poland is one of 31 NATO members, meaning the U.S. is obligated to rush to its defense militarily if it were ever attacked.

Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy did not address Trump’s comments directly on Tuesday, but warned Russian President Vladmir Putin’s expansionist ambitions were not limited to Ukraine. Thanking U.S. senators for passing an aid package that would spend billions on aid to Ukraine in a video address on social media, Zelenskyy praised them for making “a morally strong choice.”

“Such a choice matters right now, not just for Ukraine but for every nation whose independence is a target for Russian strikes, current and planned, including those planned for the coming years,” Zelenksyy said, according to a translation from his office. “Putin's ambitions have never been limited to Ukraine. His goals are far broader. This means that our defense solidarity must be even broader.”

President Joe Biden called his likely general election rival’s comments “a dangerous and shockingly un-American signal to the world.”

“NATO is a sacred commitment. Donald Trump looks at this as if it's a burden. When he looks at NATO, he doesn't see the alliance that protects America and the world. He sees a protection racket,” President Joe Biden said from White House on Tuesday, speaking in support of the $95.3 billion foreign aid package making its way through Congress. “For as long as I'm president, if Putin attacks a NATO ally, the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory.”

Trump to NATO countries: Pay up or U.S. will ‘not protect you’

At a campaign rally in South Carolina on Saturday, Trump recounted a conversation he said he once had with a NATO country’s leader during his first term. Long frustrated that many NATO countries aren’t meeting their nonbinding goal of spending 2% of their GDP on defense, Trump said he told the leader that if they were “delinquent,” he would not only “not protect you,” he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.”

Trump has frequently praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, as he has with other authoritarian leaders with increasing frequency in his pursuit of a second term. He has also been at odds with Ukraine and its president, Zelenskyy, since before the war when he attempted to parlay foreign aid to the country in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden in 2019. His and other Republicans on the party’s far-right have criticized the U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine.

At risk is the 75-year-old alliance largely centered on countering Russian military aggression. The post-World War II military pact is based on the commitment that each of its 31-member states in Europe and North America to the principle that “an armed attack against one… shall be considered an attack against them all.”

The treaty’s Article 5, which states as much, has only been triggered once in NATO’s history: in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. The then-NATO members pledged their support as the U.S. launched what would become a 20-year war in Afghanistan. 

“Poland sent a brigade for a decade. We did not send a bill to Washington,” Poland foreign minister Radek Sikorski told the New York Times on Sunday.

Other U.S. presidents have encouraged higher military spending by their European allies, but Trump has framed it as a pay-for-protection arrangement that would make U.S. military action contingent on NATO countries’ willingness to pay up.

“He doesn’t understand that NATO is built on fundamental principles of freedom, security, and national sovereignty. Because for Trump, principles never matter,” Biden said. “Everything is transactional.”

Trump is the far-and-away 2024 GOP presidential primary frontrunner, having all but eliminated his competition after just a handful of contests (his last remaining major challenger and his administration’s former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, asked “you're going to side with a thug like [Putin]?” in a Fox News interview on Monday.) Polling frequently shows Trump running ahead of Biden in hypothetical general election matchups.

For his part, Biden has said he's resoundingly committed to NATO and the U.S.-European defense project to counter Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine and beyond. 

“No other president in history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator. Let me say this as clearly as I can: I never will. For God's sake, it's dumb. It's shameful, it's dangerous. It's un-American,” Biden said on Tuesday. 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was expected to be in Brussels this week for meetings with NATO defense ministers to discuss European security and the war in Ukraine, but has been forced to remain home after being hospitalized for a bladder issue on Sunday. Other U.S. officials will represent him in his stead and he was set to attend at least one meeting on the war in Ukraine virtually on Tuesday.

Putin rewrites Ukrainian, Polish history to justify invasion

In an interview that aired over the weekend, Putin said he had no interest in invading Poland or nearby Lithuania, but argued Poland both collaborated with Nazi Germany and forced Adolf Hitler’s hand to invade the country in 1939 simultaneously with the USSR, Germany’s ally until 1941.

“Poland cooperated with Hitler, it did collaborate with Hitler, you know?” Putin told far-right American commentator Tucker Carlson in an hourslong interview at the Kremlin. “Poland turned out to be uncompromising, and Hitler had nothing to do but to start implementing his plans.”

In 2024, Putin argued, Poland still “pecks from the German hand.” Poland, like many countries occupied by Nazi Germany, had its collaborators. But millions more Polish Jews and other Poles were murdered, starved and enslaved during the horrors of the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Despite his insistence he has no druthers to invade additional European countries, Putin’s characterization of Poland as a state descended from Nazism mirrors his argument for taking over Ukraine, wrote the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, a Russian and U.S. dual citizen who has chronicled Russian politics for decades. As he has frequently since the war began, Putin told Carlson one goal of his invasion that began in February 2022 is “denazification.”

“It is necessary to stop this practice and prevent the dissemination of this concept,” Putin said. “I say that Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people, they say no, we are a separate people. Okay, fine. If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so. But not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology.”

Putin went on to argue Ukrainians do not exist as a people distinct from Russians — a denial of cultural identity by an invading world power that is a prerequisite for ethnic cleansing or even genocide, experts have argued. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin for the alleged war crime of removing thousands of children from Ukraine into Russia. Other international organizations and Ukraine have labeled scores of other Russian actions as war crimes. 

Referring to western Ukraine, Putin said in the interview that Russia “regained this historical lands after the victory in the Great Patriotic War, as we call World War II,” and made the ahistorical and false case that Ukraine's ethnic identity was invented by USSR leader Josef Stalin.

The war in Ukraine has left hundreds of thousands dead, according to Western officials, and cities in the country’s east hollowed out by bombardment and evacuations. The United Nations reported in December that over 10,000 civilians have been killed. The largest European war since World War II has seen the utilization of both new technologies and trench warfare, reminiscent of the bloody battles of World War I over a century ago.

U.S. lawmakers are rushing to get Ukraine military and humanitarian aid that Zelenskyy and military leaders there say is desperately needed as Russia continues to outman and outgun Ukrainian forces. The Democratic-controlled Senate passed the $93.5 billion aid package, $60 billion of which will go towards Ukraine’s war effort, on Monday night. It now faces a perilous vote in the Republican-controlled House, where Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has set low expectations for its immediate passage, if ever. The factions of the Republican party that oppose Ukraine aid are much more vocal and influential in the House than in the Senate.

Trump opposed the aid deal, arguing in a social media post over the weekend that “NO MONEY IN THE FORM OF FOREIGN AID SHOULD BE GIVEN TO ANY COUNTRY UNLESS IT IS DONE AS A LOAN, NOT JUST A GIVEAWAY.”

“I call the speaker to let the full House speak his mind and not allow a minority of the most extreme voices in the House to block this bill even from being voted on,” Biden said on Tuesday, noting it would likely have enough bipartisan support to pass if Johnson scheduled a vote. “This bipartisan bill sends a clear message to the Ukrainians, and to our partners, and to our allies around the world, America can't be trusted. America can be relied upon.”

Scholz, the German chancellor whose country provides the second-most aid to Ukraine after the U.S., recently told German weekly Die Zeit that the country couldn’t fill any gap on its own if “the U.S.A. ceased to be a supporter.” The European Union, which shares some overlap with NATO, recently agreed to send $54 billion in economic aid to Ukraine.

Last May, Scholz openly endorsed Biden for reelection.

On Tuesday, Russian officials said they placed Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of NATO member Estonia, on a wanted list along with two other top Estonian officials. Their crime: removing Soviet-era World War II monuments in their country since the war in Ukraine began. Other NATO countries, including states formerly controlled by Russia like Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, have done the same.

It's the first time the Russian Interior Ministry has put a foreign leader on a wanted list, according to the Associated Press. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a longtime Russia hawk who ultimately voted against the foreign aid bill after Trump’s encouragement, was also on the list.

Sweden is on the path to become NATO’s 32nd member and Finland joined the alliance last April after both countries ditched their long-held positions of military nonalignment in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine itself aspires to be a NATO member, but — while Biden, Stoltenberg and others have said it should eventually join the alliance — western leaders have said its ascension will have to wait until after the war so as to not obligate the U.S. and other NATO countries to enter the current ground war with Russia.

“Our country can definitely become one of the global security donors and one of the strongest members of NATO,” Zelenskyy said in December. “We are working for this.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.