Russia Strikes Kyiv as NATO Convenes in Ankara, U.S. Troop Withdrawal Rattles Baltic Allies
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Russia launched a large-scale missile barrage on Kyiv in the hours before NATO summit leaders arrived in Ankara on Monday — the second major attack on the Ukrainian capital in less than a week — damaging residential buildings and leaving residents trapped under rubble. The timing was widely read as a deliberate message from Moscow: the summit cannot stop this. The choice of Ankara as the host city is itself a geopolitical statement, reflecting Turkey's two-year effort to position itself as indispensable alliance infrastructure by mediating in the Black Sea grain corridor, maintaining independent dialogue with Russia, supplying Ukraine with drones, and selling air defense systems regionally — never entirely predictable, always essential.
Ukraine's own strike operations provided important context for how the war is evolving beneath the diplomatic noise. Over 500 Ukrainian drones struck the Yaroslavl oil refinery and blacked out Crimea overnight — a qualitatively significant operation given that Yaroslavl lies hundreds of kilometers inside Russian territory. Ukraine's demonstrated ability to project disruptive force that deep into Russian infrastructure both showcases the leverage Kyiv would bring to any ceasefire negotiation and complicates the terms of any settlement.
The withdrawal of nearly all U.S. troops from Estonia — announced while NATO leaders were literally convening — sent an extraordinarily mixed signal to Baltic governments that have been the alliance's most hawkish voices on Russia for years. Trip-wire forces matter in deterrence calculations because their presence signals that any incursion would immediately produce American casualties; removing them shifts that calculus without eliminating the Article 5 commitment on paper. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania share a historical experience of Soviet occupation that gives them a threat perception Western European members do not always match with equal urgency.
France's defense posture created complications from a different direction. Paris pushed hard to exclude the United Kingdom from the EU's joint defense fund as a post-Brexit assertion of European autonomy, a strategy that has reportedly backfired and cost France billions as the fund struggled without the industrial base and political coherence British participation would have provided. The episode illustrates a recurring tension: geopolitical principle and practical security interest do not always point in the same direction.