“No matter how you look at it, he’s doing pretty well. He’s holding his own,” Trump said of Zelensky during an Oval Office sit-down with North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Mark Rutte on Wednesday, noting the high casualty count on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides of the war. “He’s courageous, he’s got great equipment, but he’s got great men. He’s got fighters.”

The president campaigned heavily on ending limitless American support of Ukraine’s defense, the de facto stance of the Biden administration, and he’s repeatedly taken flak from NATO leaders in the past for handling Russian President Vladimir Putin with “kid gloves,” as one veteran European diplomat told the Washington Examiner.

“I believe that what President Trump is saying now, compared to where we were this time last year, is really an extraordinary turnaround,” that person stated. “There was a time where [Europe] was really worried that the president would pressure Ukraine into completely caving to Russia’s demands for ending the war, but he seems to be in a different headspace.”

But White House officials denied that Trump’s apparent 180 signaled a shift in American policy on the war. 

“The President has a humanitarian heart and wants this war settled so the senseless killing ends,” a White House official told the Washington Examiner. “The President and his team have worked very hard to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, and he remains optimistic that we’ll ultimately get a peace deal done.”

Still, Trump’s own words appear to have caused significant hand-wringing in Moscow. Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov questioned whether Trump’s meeting with Putin last year in Anchorage, Alaska, and the president’s consistent calls for a ceasefire were a “U.S. ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime.”

“As far as Ukraine ​is concerned, we want to understand what happened in Evian,” Lavrov said in Moscow. “The Americans haven’t yet ​told us what they took away from the summit in Evian or what their future course of action will be.”

While the first few years of the war saw Ukraine fighting on the back foot, a government focus on both offensive and defensive drone capabilities has made Ukraine into a global leader in unmanned battlefield technologies. This fact was underlined by 10-year drone defense agreements the country signed with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates during the war in Iran.

Iryna Zabolotna, the chief operating officer at Ukrainian state-backed military investment and innovation group Brave1, told the Washington Examiner that in May of this year alone, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense “authorized 175 new weapons and military equipment models for operational use.” Zabolotna claimed that “nearly 93%” of the new systems were wholly developed and manufactured by Ukrainian defense companies.

She also told the Washington Examiner that Ukraine is actively seeking partnerships with Western countries to try out emerging technologies on Ukrainian battlefields.

“We are super open. We established a test in Ukraine – a program where any company from the Allied countries can visit Ukraine and test their solution in the near-combat conditions and get feedback from the soldiers,” she said. “There is simply nowhere else in the world where a company can validate its technology in such conditions at the moment.”

While the White House isn’t officially changing policy yet, three senior Trump administration officials told the Washington Examiner that Ukraine’s near-overnight buildup of its own military industrial complex has certainly caught the attention of the American government and signaled that some in the administration believe Ukraine represents model behavior in terms of Trump’s demands of fellow NATO members on defense spending.

Next month, Trump travels to Turkey to attend the NATO leaders’ summit, where both Ukraine and total defense budgets will likely be top topics of conversation.

Speaking in Washington on Thursday, Rutte, widely known as one of Europe’s foremost “Trump whisperers,” said that he had “no complaints” about the current U.S. stance on Ukraine.

“You guys are still providing this essential anti-ballistic missile equipment, particularly the PAC-3 missiles for the Patriot system, but also other essential gear only the U.S. can provide,” he said.

Ahead of the meeting, the Trump administration announced a six-month review of U.S. troop deployments to Europe, the president’s latest effort to cajole his European peers into pouring 5% of their respective gross domestic products toward military spending.

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Most NATO members pledged to meet that spending goal during last summer’s summit, but Rutte added that next month’s meetings in Turkey would be even more important in terms of sending a unified message to Russia.

“It’s great to have the commitments, and The Hague was a big success, but then to deliver on the commitments, and that’s what I’m seeing is going to happen in Ankara, is even more important,” he said Thursday. “In the end, Putin is not afraid of commitments. He is afraid of implementing those commitments, and that’s exactly what we are doing, Vladimir.”