As Biden heads to Europe, the mood on Ukraine is grimmer

The president is also departing the United States just a day after one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in history. The overturning of Roe v. Wade on Friday is roiling the country and animating the Democratic Party just as its leader leaves for a long-planned trip abroad.

The previous unity among Western nations is showing signs of fracturing, with splits emerging between those who favor a negotiated peace as soon as possible and those who want to let Ukraine fight as long as it takes to reclaim its territory. The war has meanwhile taken a punishing toll on the global economy, and rocketing gasoline prices back home will make it harder for leaders to impose even more sanctions on Russian oil.

What began as a nearly unprecedented display of transatlantic unity, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rallying the world’s democracies to stand by his country, has now evolved into a longer, more complex struggle, with no clear end in sight.

“Both the reality and the mood have shifted. Things are trending against Ukraine, trending toward Russia, given the nature of the battle at this point,” said Richard Haass, a veteran diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “So the question is: What more are countries prepared to do to help Ukraine militarily and economically? But it’s a more sober and somber mood. The trends are not good.”

The financial cost of the conflict has sharply escalated four months in, both the money required for Ukraine to fend off Russia’s aggression and the toll on the global economy. When the leaders gather this coming week — first for a meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized nations in Germany, followed immediately by a NATO summit in Spain — the discussions will focus less on the lofty language of democracy and more on the hard realities of whether the allies can maintain their newfound unity.

“This is very different from his last summit,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a global risk consultancy. “This is not a summit about deliverables, it’s not a summit about body language, it’s not a summit about a communique. It’s a summit about war, a summit about a global crisis that will dominate all the conversations.”

Bremmer added that NATO members will need to focus on the basic architecture of the alliance and questions that have not arisen since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Already the Ukraine war has both strengthened NATO — Finland and Sweden are asking to join — and exposed its divisions, as Turkey splits with the other allies in objecting to the two countries’ candidacy.

“You’re expanding NATO, you’re spending more money on defense, you’re forward-deploying troops, and you’re in an environment where there’s going to be cyberattacks and espionage from Russia,” Bremmer said. “This is literally a new cold war, with elements of a hot war with Russia. And the question is, how are you going to deal with that?”

Zelensky will address the G-7 and NATO summits virtually, in an effort to prod Western nations to maintain the enthusiastic backing his country attracted in the war’s early stages.

But divisions are emerging over how much and what kind of military assistance to provide Ukraine. Countries face different levels of war fatigue and a dependence on Russian natural gas that varies by country. If the last gathering showcased a unified response, this one is overshadowed by questions of whether these disagreements can be resolved.

“The overarching theme for G-7 and NATO is the high political and economic costs of doing what is right versus doing what is easy,” said Heather A. Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund. “The Kremlin is banking that we won’t pay those costs. They’ve been wrong so far. But will they be wrong over the next six months when the pain is felt most acutely?”

Biden’s meetings start on Sunday at Schloss Elmau, Germany, where G-7 leaders will discuss the high prices and food and energy crises that have resulted from the war.

Biden is then scheduled to travel Tuesday to Madrid for the NATO summit, which is likely to include spirited discussions on whether to admit Finland and Sweden. The summit will also focus on efforts to integrate Ukraine into Europe’s basic alliances — NATO…