Donald Trump just scrapped Europe’s Tomahawk deployment in Germany. The only producer in Europe with comparable long-range strike capability is the country bombed every night by Russia. Estonia’s former defense chief, MEP Riho Terras, said it on national radio on 5 May: stop blaming Washington and look at Kyiv for a solution.
Stop blaming Washington and look at Kyiv for a solution.
The Pentagon’s withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany, announced on 1 May with deeper cuts threatened in Italy and Spain, was the headline blow. The bigger one came alongside it: the cancellation of a planned US Tomahawk battalion that Joe Biden and then-chancellor Olaf Scholz had announced for 2027 as a temporary bridge until Europe could field its own systems. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has now publicly admitted the cancellation “tears this capability gap open again.”
An obvious answer
That gap, Terras told Vikerraadio, has an obvious answer few in Brussels will say out loud.
“Attention should be turned to Ukraine, which… is slowly but surely developing such a long-range capability, as we see from fires in various energy centers in Russia,” he said.
Ukraine’s domestically built Flamingo and Long Neptune cruise missiles have hit Russian oil refineries and ammunition depots 1,000 km behind the front line.
Frontline report: Ukraine’s missile production surge tears through Russian strategic targets
And Kyiv just opened formal arms exports under a “Drone Deals” framework—with joint production lines in Denmark, Finland, and Slovakia, export offices in Berlin and Copenhagen, and 10-year defense deals with three Gulf states.
Giving the cards away
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The canceled Tomahawks, Terras said, are exactly what Vladimir Putin has been demanding throughout US-Russia negotiations. By scrapping the deployment, “Trump is giving away one of his cards”—far worse, in Terras’s view, than the troop pullout itself.
If Europe wants long-range deterrence against Russia, the production lines are already running.
European governments accusing Washington of “all the sins of the world,” he argued, should commit at least 3% to 5% of GDP to defense before lecturing the United States, which still provides roughly half of NATO’s military power.
For a former chief of the Estonian Defense Forces, the logic is simple: if Europe wants long-range deterrence against Russia, the production lines are already running—and the export door is open—in Ukraine.
