WASHINGTON (Independence Avenue Media) — In an interview with Independence Avenue Media, Nico Lange, a former senior official in Germany’s Ministry of Defense and current Senior Fellow with the Munich Security Conference, offered a sober assessment of current Western policies toward Ukraine, warning that half-measures and delayed decisions may prolong the war and embolden the Kremlin.
Responding to President Donald Trump’s recent statement that Ukraine could receive unlimited U.S. weapons if NATO allies foot the bill, Lange described the development as “second-best” — useful but lacking the necessary U.S. pressure on Russia that could bring Moscow to the negotiating table. While he welcomed Germany’s growing leadership in defense procurement, Lange stressed that Western support must not only be sustained, but sharpened, especially in areas like air defense and deep-strike capabilities.
Discussing the much-publicized “50-day” window reportedly floated by Trump for resolving the war, Lange was skeptical, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin will only respond to concrete pressure, particularly in the energy sector. He questioned whether countries like India and China—key Russian energy partners—would take such deadlines seriously.
On the battlefield, Lange warned that Russia continues to grind forward at immense human cost, relying on monetary incentives to recruit soldiers rather than general mobilization. He emphasized the strategic importance of protecting Ukrainian cities with air defense systems, both to prevent civilian deaths and to sustain morale on the front lines.
Lange criticized the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden for its early reluctance to involve NATO explicitly, arguing that it sent the wrong signals while failing to deter Russia. He is now urging Europe, and especially Germany, to emerge from a “mental prison” that sees Ukrainian defeat as inevitable, and instead embrace a posture of strategic ownership. “It’s puzzling,” he said, “that Europeans still expect someone else to solve their own security crisis.”
He advocates greater NATO integration, including shared air defense, deeper procurement coordination, and political clarity—warning that, without it, Putin will simply wait for Western resolve to crack.
The following interview was recorded on July 20, 2025, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Independence Avenue Media Editor in Chief, Ia Meurmishvili: Let’s start with an overarching question, which relates President Trump’s relationship with Ukraine. About a week ago, Trump announced that Ukraine could essentially receive unlimited weapons, as long as NATO allies or individual NATO countries paid for them. What do you think this means? Are we seeing a change of heart from Trump toward Ukraine?
Senior Fellow with the Munich Security Conference, Nico Lange: Well, first of all, it’s good news for people in Ukrainian cities that at least Patriot systems and Patriot missiles can be bought, along with missiles for drone defense and short-range air defense. Russian air attacks on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, have been terrible, with many civilian casualties. So, it’s good news, but it’s also the second-best option.
The best option would be if the U.S. would not only declare but show real interest in helping Ukraine put military pressure on Russia. That’s the only path that could lead to meaningful negotiations. Trump doesn’t seem to be willing to do that. But the second-best option — this has been discussed for a while — would be that Ukraine would get U.S. capabilities, weapons, and ammunition that the Europeans are not producing, [and] that the Europeans would pay for it. I’m glad that it worked out this way.
Germany is taking the lead here, and I think [Chancellor] Friedrich Merz’s relationship with Trump helped make that possible. Now, the question is: what kind of weapons will there be besides air defense? It’s not entirely clear yet. But it seems there’s a larger package that certainly will help Ukraine on the military side, not only to sustain [the fight] but possibly to put pressure on Russia.
The open question is, will Trump pressure Putin at least in the energy sector during the 50 days that he has now set, or will nothing happen in those 50 days? Because if nothing happens, I don’t think Putin will agree to something just because the 50 days have passed.
Meurmishvili: Are you saying we need to see what happens after the 50 days. You don’t have any expectations that Putin will change his actions beforehand?
Lange: The most important thing is what happens within the 50 days. Will there be military pressure on Putin? Will there be pressure on energy — with not having the shadow fleet calling to ports, maybe the oil price going further down? There’s now a new sanctions package from the European Union. Will this have consequences for the oil price cap?
If pressure is built up during the 50 days, then Putin will do something. But if no pressure is built up, why would he agree to something?
Meurmishvili: Do you think India and China are taking these 50 days seriously, as President Trump wants them to?
Lange: That’s difficult to judge because President Trump already had a couple of ultimatums and he always changed [them] to something else or changed course. Also, taxes that were announced later morphed into something else. So, maybe everyone is just waiting to see whether Trump is really pushing this through or is he making up new announcements or setting new conditions out? India and China are not the only buyers of Russian oil and gas. I mean, they are affected by this, but it’s also the Slovak Republic, Hungary, Italy. So, European leaders that have the reputation of being friends with Trump: Will Trump really follow through and impose sanctions on them? So, yes, there are many open questions when it comes to this, but I don’t think that Putin or [Chinese President] Xi Jinping or [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi have sleepless nights because of this.
Meurmishvili: Do you think 50 days is enough for some of those countries, including some of the European countries, to rearrange their energy needs and completely stop buying Russian oil and gas and pivot to something else, possibly U.S. Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) or U.S. energy resources?
Lange: For many countries in Europe, there’s a clear path even without U.S. LNG. Germany recently announced that it will buy more American LNG. And the European Union have made a decision completely disallow buying of any Russian energy resources within its territory from 2027. The more important question: will this disengage China and India from Russia or will they find a way around this? Because this is where Putin, I think, gets the larger part of the revenues now. But it’s also a question to the Europeans. India, for example, is refining Russian oil, and then the fuel is bought by Europeans. So, if we are serious about this, we should also not buy this from India anymore. So, there are open questions around these pressure points, certainly.
But coming back to the initial question: Putin will look at all this—at India, at China, at European Union, at Trump—and wait it out and see if they are really doing the necessary steps that would, in the end, pressure him. Then he can decide whether he has to react or not. So, he seems very relaxed about this. Putin does not seem to trust that everybody will follow through on this.
Meurmishvili: What would you say about what’s happening on the front lines now? Are we seeing some of these weapons already making their way or is it too early to say?
Lange: Weapons from what currently has been agreed certainly are not seen at the front lines yet.
Meurmishvili: There are some unconfirmed reports that this package could also include JASSMs [low-detection, air-launched Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile]. Do you find it credible?
Lange: It would be great to have standoff weapons with higher ranges. Ukraine needs that to put pressure on Russia. It would then depend on which exact type of JASSM it would be, because the range varies depending on the type. We will see. We will find out [only once] they are used on the battlefield. (I mean, it’s also a good approach not to tell the other side what exactly you are delivering.)
But on the front lines, it seems to me that Russia is not really doing well with the offensive they started a couple of weeks ago. They are drawing the conclusion that they have to do more of the same. And they are slowly advancing around Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka.
So, we will see those [Donbas] cities being pressured. But this is very far from the strategic successes that Putin wanted to have going into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, going after the city of Sumi, taking Luhansk and Donetsk Oblast fully, or even talking about Odessa. Putin is absolutely far away from reaching any of those goals.
Meurmishvili: Do you think this Monday’s announcement had some sort of impact on troop morale?
Lange: The situation on the front lines is bad enough, but people I met there, they are very tough, and they are not on the front lines for the first day. So, they know how to handle the tough situations. But what bothers them is if the cities are not protected, where their families live, their relatives live. So, the air defense for Kyiv and other big cities in Ukraine is something that is also important for soldiers on the front lines. And some of them are even saying, “look, we need equipment, we need weapons, ammunition on the front lines, but it’s even more important to protect our families at home.” That, I think, is a very important element to understand when talking about Patriot systems and Patriot-missile battery systems.
Meurmishvili: A bit of a technical question: President Trump said that Ukraine will be getting possibly 17 patriots, possibly fewer. What does that mean when you hear that? To you at least, is it the patriot systems? What could Trump be referencing?
Lange: I think what president Trump was referring to might be the total number of patriot systems that will be in Ukraine after the end of the process. There have been patriot systems already donated to Ukraine. They are American produced, but they have been donated by countries such as Germany or Norway or the Netherlands or others who had them in their possession and then delivered them to Ukraine. So only the new ones, the newly produced [ones] that now Germany and other countries are paying for, are directly coming from the U.S.
Ukraine is a big country. You need a number of air defense systems to produce relative safety. The key question, though, is what about the missiles? There is a shortage of air-defense missiles, and the Patriot, the PAC-3 — that’s the name of the missiles — they are slowly produced. Everybody wants to have them. So the question for Ukraine increasingly seems to be not about how many Patriot systems do we have, but about how many Patriot missiles do we have. The Europeans are starting their own production of Patriot missiles, but this will not produce results until sometime in 2026. And that’s most important for Ukraine now. How to get your hands on Patriot missiles.
And there’s another truth I think that we have to mention here. Patriot missiles are very useful against ballistic missiles and aeroballistics missiles, where you have a short warning time and you can shoot them down. That’s what makes the system so valuable. But against the hundreds of drones that we see every night, going to Ukrainian cities, it’s not a good idea to use the expensive Patriot missiles. You need other means for that.
Meurmishvili: And is there any movement in that direction to develop a system? Is Ukraine developing something together with Germany that will be very impactful against Shahed drones?
Lange: In order to counter hundreds of drones, you need a multi-layered air defense. There is not a single system that you can use to shoot down all the drones. There are different systems you need.
Ukraine is making good progress in bringing many of those drones down by warfare in the electromagnetic spectrum—that is, jamming and spoofing.
I think we can support Ukraine with that. [And] jamming the satellite navigation from the Russian side, the GLONASS system, is very helpful to counter those drones. There are short-range air defense systems. Some of them are from the U.S., some of them for other countries, where you need ammunition that can help.
We have a German air-defense tank that is quite good in bringing down those drones. There are other rapid-fire guns that can help. So, you need a mix of weapons to bring many of those drones down. [And] Ukraine is experimenting with drone-to-drone combat. So, you have hunting drones bringing those Shaheed drones down. So far, I think electronic warfare is the most promising way of bringing those drones down. But we will have to see. In order to really get to the bottom of the problem, you need deep-strike precision fires and just take out the drone factories. That is much more efficient than [trying] to defend against thousands of drones. That’s why the question [of] whether there are, for example, JASSM missiles in the package from the U.S., is so important.
Meurmishvili: How is Russia doing from the standpoint of manpower? We hear about how Russia is basically bribing its own citizens to go fight. The number of soldiers the Russians are losing on the battlefield is just staggering. Do you think Russia can sustain this? Is Putin going to have enough people to sustain this summer offensive at this intense level?
Lange: Putin found an equilibrium after experimenting with mobilization—mobilization that, I think, went the wrong way and produced a lot of negative discussions in Russia. The equilibrium he found is offering a lot of money to soldiers who go and fight. These amounts, if you compare them to Russian salaries, are so high that even the families are pressuring them, saying “you have to go. We can all live for a long time from this salary.” And it seems as long as Putin has the money, he is able to send soldiers to the front lines and he doesn’t seem to care very much that he loses 800 or 1,000 a day to injury and even death. The way the Russians are fighting is very primitive and the progress is very slow. And that means the cost, when it comes to the human costs of this, is [many] Russians being killed for taking a small village or a city in Ukraine. The costs are extremely high. And that is what I think makes Putin and Russia so dangerous. I don’t know of any other country where the leadership is ready to send so many of their own people into death just to advance a little bit on the front lines.
I think more important is to see this as the threat and not the number of tanks that Russia is producing or the number of missiles they are making. That is, the real threat that comes from Russia. It’s a way of fighting that … Ukraine cannot fight like that. We could not fight like that. That is something that should at least lead us to the conclusion that we need to give Ukraine the instruments to transform the warfare into another way of fighting and not going into this Russian way of fighting, which absolutely does not value human life.
Meurmishvili: When we talk about transferring weapons to Ukraine from Europe, from NATO allies, why are countries reluctant to give up some of the weapons and provide more help to Ukraine? For example, for a country deep inside Europe to give all the Patriot missiles they have. Is it really dangerous for them? Let’s say Germany, for example. Is Germany expecting Russia to send rockets to Berlin?
Lange: Well, you could add the question, why on earth was it not possible within three years to ramp up the production? Why were the decisions not made to produce more, because then the problem would be less of a problem? I think there are certain elements to this.
One of the elements is that many decision makers—not all of them, but many of them—are still in a mental prison. And the mental prison is derived from the first days of the war, where many decision makers thought, “It’s over. Ukraine will lose. Russia will win. Russia will take control over Ukraine.” Within the system of military and decision-making on the political level, many people did not move out of that mental prison. They still believe that we can help Ukraine a little, but [that] in the end, Russia will win. [And] I think that’s absolutely wrong. Ukraine has demonstrated that the opposite is true, but it’s still a guideline for decision-making for many. And, of course, it doesn’t help because then you arrive at thinking “yes, we can help a little bit, but we will preserve everything else for ourselves because it’s hopeless with Ukraine anyway. And we have to be prepared for the later stage, where it might be about us.” So, coming out of that mental prison seems to be important.
Scandinavians already, from the very beginning, have a totally different mindset. Many Central and Eastern Europeans have. The Ukrainians certainly know that you can beat Russia. But it’s more important that the big European nations and the U.S. come out of that mental prison, because it’s a recipe for a long war [in which] Ukraine [will have to] to bear the costs. And the second element in this is [that] the Europeans are reluctant to have ownership — especially Germany, because security from a German point of view for the last decades worked in the following way: “Somebody else is solving our security questions on the European continent.”
Here, the decision the Germans have to [make] is whether they take part or not take part, or comment from the sidelines. But the Europeans having ownership for their own security — not only by committing a certain percentage of their GDP, like they did in The Hague, but really making the important decisions on how to push Putin back to peace, how to preserve peace after a possible ceasefire — that seems to develop only [after] very hard reluctance. [And that’s] puzzling because it’s so obvious — it must be the Europeans who push Putin back to peace. That’s exactly the question he is asking. The Trump administration will not do this for the Europeans. And if they are not doing this themselves, it will get worse and it will be more expensive and more difficult to fight Putin later. So, it’s puzzling to me and I’m certainly trying to convince [people] that this decision has to be made.
It is an irony that the only person expressing this clearly this year at the Munich Security Conference was Ukrainian President [Volodymyr] Zelensky, who made the point that you cannot really make a difference between European security and security of Ukraine. It’s the same thing. But it seems to me that in the German political elites, there is a difference between securing Ukraine — or bringing peace back to Ukraine — and European security, [such] that European security starts somewhere west of Ukraine. And I think that’s the strategic mistake.
Meurmishvili: To give the viewers a bit of background on this, the Biden administration tried very hard not to involve NATO in this crisis. In any case, we still have the Ramstein format [an alliance of 57 countries including all 32 NATO member-states]. While NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was in Washington, President Trump at least created the perception that the U.S. would elevate NATO’s role. Do you think this decision will change the attitudes that you just described? Does it matter to have NATO directly involved in coordinating assistance provision?
Lange: First of all, I believe the Biden policy was wrong on this whole idea that we don’t mention NATO [and] keep NATO out of it and don’t make it look like NATO is doing something. What was this good for? In Russian media — even in Putin’s [own] words — the Russians were saying that they are fighting NATO. All the way from the very beginning. So, what was the point of doing this? I do not understand. Many opportunities were missed, I think, by having this kind of approach. So, that was clearly not a good policy by the Biden administration [and], by extension, the German government was just one-to-one following everything that was coming from the Biden White House. Also, the government [of former Chancellor Olaf Scholz] had the wrong policy on this. And others were more forward leaning, and I think they were right, and I think we have to say this now.
It’s better to have NATO as the clearinghouse for military capabilities that go to Ukraine. It’s better to have NATO involved when it comes to intelligence, surveillance, support of the Ukrainians with many things they need. But it’s for the Europeans in NATO to step up on this. But, of course, that’s the institution we use for European security. Why should we not use it for the biggest security problem in Europe that we have? It doesn’t make sense.
And with everything that NATO does in Europe, it prepares for defense and deterrence against the same Russia that is attacking Ukraine. It’s the same adversary. So, I think it’s good that NATO is involved. [I] think NATO should be involved more. And if you see what concretely should be done, NATO should be involved in Ukrainian air defense by using capabilities on the eastern border of NATO and [the] European Union to shoot down Russian missiles and drones over Ukrainian airspace, if you can reach them. And by helping Ukraine with capabilities to bring down the drones that are coming [by the] thousands, that would be a good next step for the Europeans in NATO, to get involved within the NATO framework.
Meurmishvili: Do you think allies are getting closer to making that decision or thinking in that direction? Will we see integrated NATO-Ukraine air defense systems at some point?
Lange: I’m bringing it up, others are bringing it up. My experience during the last three and a half years is that political decision makers sometimes need help with ideas and also with a little bit of public push for ideas because they are so reluctant in doing something. But this touches very much in Europe the question of who we are as European nations. Are we European nations watching how families are getting killed in their sleep by missiles and drones? Is that what we want to be? We just had the sad anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre and we’re commemorating it in Europe. I remember very well, and I was on missions myself to the Balkans twice. I remember very well how we told everybody, “We will not do this again. We will not be indifferent again to something like this happening on the European continent. We will be different as Europeans. We Will interfere. We will protect human lives on the European continent.”
So, many years after that it touches a core question of not only security, but also of European identity. Who do we want to be? And I cannot just accept that we will say that there’s nothing we can do when families are getting killed in Kyiv or Odessa or Lviv. And then all we do is make a kind of wishy-washy statement that does not really mean anything and certainly does not change anything for Putin.
So, there needs to be a public push for doing the right thing.
