Without billions of dollars in American-made weapons, it may be only a matter of time before Ukraine’s forces falter against Russia.
How much time, however, depends on how quickly Europe and Ukraine can make up for the artillery, missiles, air-defense systems and other arms that Trump administration officials said on Monday were being put on hold.
The United States had committed to delivering as much as $11 billion in weapons and equipment to Ukraine this year. Some of it was from Pentagon stockpiles, while some was ordered through new defense contracts, according to a new analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. A former senior U.S. defense official on Tuesday said the actual figure was likely closer to $9 billion.
Despite Europe’s pledges of unwavering support for Ukraine, which have only intensified since the Trump administration began pulling back, it would be nearly impossible for it to fill the weapons gap quickly. European defense industries have ramped up, but only in fits and starts. And individual countries need to maintain their own weapons stockpiles.
“Europe can’t possibly replace American aid,” the former deputy of Ukraine’s military general staff, Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, said last month.
Ukraine itself has been churning out drones and building up domestically made artillery systems, and it plans to spend 26 percent of its budget on defense this year. But some top Ukrainian officials say the military will be in dire straits if American support is not restarted.
“Ukraine definitely has a safety margin of about six months even without systematic assistance from the United States, but it will be much more difficult, of course,” one lawmaker, Fedir Venislavskyi, told the news agency RBC-Ukraine on Tuesday.
Some analysts say they think even that may be overly optimistic.
“Certainly, by the four-month time period, their forces would start to buckle, because they just wouldn’t have enough munitions and equipment to replace what they’ve lost,” said one of the authors of the Center for Strategic and International Studies study, Mark F. Cancian, a former White House weapons strategist.
Why can’t Europe fill the gap?
Of the $136 billion in military aid that allies provided Ukraine from the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 to the end of last year, nearly half came from the United States, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organization.
The American share has dwindled over time as the defense industries in Ukraine and Europe have accelerated production. Only about 20 percent of military hardware currently supplied to Ukraine comes from the United States, according to recent estimates by the Royal United Services Institute, an analytical group affiliated with the British military.
“But the 20 percent is the most lethal and important,” said Malcolm Chalmers, the institute’s deputy director general. Ukraine won’t abruptly collapse without the American weapons, Mr. Chalmers predicted. “The effect,” he said, “will be cumulative.”
The United States, the world’s largest economy, simply has more resources at its disposal. Its Air Force, for example, has 17 large electronic surveillance aircraft, while Britain has only three, according to Douglas Barrie, a military aerospace expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. The United States contributes over half of all NATO’s fighter jets and ground-attack aircraft.
Citing the “short-term urgency to act,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Tuesday announced a $841 billion plan to increase defense budgets across Europe and encourage joint procurement among states to speed weapons manufacturing. But previous efforts have fallen short, with E.U. countries pulled between domestic spending priorities and defense contractors unable to produce vast amounts of costly weapons without upfront capital.
Ms. von der Leyen seemed to acknowledge this.
“The real question in front of us is whether Europe is prepared to act as decisively as the situation dictates, and whether Europe is ready and able to act with speed and with the ambition that is needed,” she said.
Artillery production in Europe is now nearly able to keep up with the wartime demands, said Camille Grand, who was NATO’s assistant secretary general for defense investment when Russia invaded. That is a remarkable turnabout for an industry that had atrophied after the end of the Cold War in 1991.
But manufacturers of more advanced weapons like the air defenses Ukraine says are crucial to its survival are still struggling to quickly produce those systems in large numbers. It can take years to hire and train additional workers, expand factory space and obtain rare earths and other raw materials in a competitive market that has been slowed by a limited supply chain.
And industry executives say they cannot invest in those improvements without the guarantee of contracts that generally run for at least a decade, and that some governments have been unwilling to provide.
“We are not on a real war economy footage as we speak, certainly by comparison with Russia,” said Mr. Grand, now a weapons expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He said it would take more political will in Europe to get defense contracts rolling: “Money is not sufficient to solve everything.”
What is Ukraine doing to arm itself?
Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, insisted on social media this week that “of course, our military, the government, have the capabilities, the tools to maintain the situation on the front line.” But he would not disclose what is left in Ukraine’s stockpile, likely to prevent exposing any vulnerabilities to Russia.
Mr. Shmyhal said that Ukraine would be able to produce enough artillery for itself by later this year, and that it was building its own armored vehicles and antitank weapons. Last year, Ukraine built more than one million first-person-view drones, and intends to increase production in 2025.
Ukraine is also reportedly trying to produce air defenses as sophisticated as the American-made Patriot system, which can intercept ballistic missiles. Each Patriot system — consisting of interceptor missiles, launchers, radar and a command center — can cost $1 billion and takes up to two years to build.
Of the seven Patriot air defense systems that the United States and Germany have given Ukraine, at least two have been destroyed, according to the weapons tracking site Oryx. Shorter-range air defenses have been sent by Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Romania, among others.
But Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe, and the Russian bombardment has been incessant. “You’re always going to have to pick and choose — you aren’t going to be able to defend against everything,” said Mr. Barrie, the military aerospace expert.
‘Doomed?’
In his study, titled “Is Ukraine Now Doomed?” Mr. Cancian predicted that without U.S. military aid, Kyiv would be forced to accept an unfavorable cease-fire agreement with Russia. That might mean ceding a fifth of its territory and giving up its aspirations to join NATO.
And some allies might now decide to cut back their own aid, reasoning that without American support, “this is a lost cause,” Mr. Cancian said in an interview.
Along with the suspended military aid, the Trump administration also paused sharing intelligence with Ukraine, the C.I.A.’s director, John Ratcliffe, said in an interview with Fox Business News on Wednesday. He predicted that the pause “will go away” if President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine shows more willingness to work on Mr. Trump’s plan for a cease-fire with Russia.
Fears also have been raised recently that Ukraine will lose access to the Starlink satellite internet system that facilitates military communication and is owned by Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s close ally.
But it is clear that “halting security assistance will only make it more challenging for Ukraine to reach a just and lasting end to this war,” said David Shimer, who was the National Security Council’s director for Eastern Europe and Ukraine during the Biden administration.
“It will reduce Ukraine’s leverage, weaken the Ukrainian military, and therefore undermine Ukraine’s negotiating position with Russia,” Mr. Shimer said. “The United States should be focused on strengthening, not weakening, Ukraine’s hand ahead of a negotiation.”
Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.
The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck
The video blogger had visited Dongji Village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.
But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.
She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. When the blogger asked if she could understand him, she shook her head. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.
The video quickly spread online, and immediately, Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.
Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.
Public outrage only grew. People wrote blog posts demanding to know why women could be treated like animals. Others printed fliers or visited the village to investigate for themselves. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.
The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.
And yet, it did.
To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad, involving mass surveillance, censorship and detentions — a campaign that continues to this day.
The clampdown shows how rattled the authorities are by a growing movement demanding improvements to the role of women in Chinese society. Though the party says it supports gender equality, under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the government has described motherhood as a patriotic duty, jailed women’s rights activists and censored calls for tougher laws to protect women from mistreatment.
Yet even as the crackdown forced women to hide their anger, it did not extinguish it. In secret, a new generation of activists has emerged, more determined than ever to continue fighting.
Who Is the Chained Woman?
At first sight, Dongji looks like any other village in China’s vast countryside. Two hours from the nearest city, it sits among sprawling wheat and rice fields in Jiangsu Province, half empty, most residents long departed to look for better lives elsewhere.
But when a colleague and I visited recently, one house, with faded maroon double doors, appeared to be guarded by two men. A surveillance camera on a nearby pole pointed directly at the entrance.
This was the street where the chained woman had lived.
Officially, there was little reason that her house should still be under watch, since in the government’s telling, the case had been resolved.
After widespread outrage over the government’s initial statement, in January 2022, officials promised a new investigation. Over the next month, four government offices released statements that at points conflicted with each other — offering different dates for when she was first chained, for example, or alternately suggesting that she had been homeless or gotten lost before arriving in Dongji. Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.
According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.
As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.
Trafficking women has been a big business in China for decades. A longstanding cultural preference for boys, exacerbated by the one-child policy, created a surplus of tens of millions of men, many of whom could not find wives. Poor, rural men in eastern China began buying women from the country’s even poorer western regions.
Xiaohuamei was sold three times, finally to a man in Dongji — more than 2,000 miles from her hometown — who wanted a wife for his son, Dong Zhimin, the government said.
Over the next 20 years, she gave birth to eight children, even as her mental health visibly deteriorated, the government said, citing interviews with Mr. Dong and villagers. When she first arrived in Dongji, she had been able to take care of herself; by the time she was found, she had trouble communicating.
The government report did not say whether other villagers knew she had been trafficked. But self-styled charity bloggers had been visiting Mr. Dong and presenting him as a doting father since at least 2021. (The woman appeared in some videos, but unchained.)
“My biggest dream is to slowly bring the children up into healthy adults,” Mr. Dong told one blogger, before the video of the shack emerged.
Privately, though, Mr. Dong had been chaining the children’s mother around the neck and tying her with cloth ropes since 2017, the government said. He also did not take her to the hospital when she was sick.
Censors deleted the bloggers’ videos of the family and of the woman in chains. In April 2023, Mr. Dong was sentenced to prison, along with five others accused of participating in the trafficking.
The official story ended there.
Step 1: Hide the Victim
As we approached the house where the men were sitting, they jumped up and asked who we were. One made a phone call, while another blocked me from taking photos.
Ten more people soon arrived, including police officers, propaganda officials and the village leader, who insisted that the scandal had been overblown. “Everything is very normal, extremely normal,” he said. When we asked where the woman was, officials said they believed that she didn’t want visitors. Then they escorted us to the train station.
The chained woman may be choosing to stay out of the public eye. But the Chinese government often silences victims of crimes or accidents that generate public anger. Relatives of people killed in plane crashes, coronavirus patients and survivors of domestic violence have all been shuffled out of sight, threatened or detained.
Some weeks later, we tried to go back. This time, we visited a hospital where China’s state broadcaster said the woman was sent after the video went viral — her last known whereabouts.
We tracked down Dr. Teng Xiaoting, a physician who had treated her. Dr. Teng said the woman was no longer there, but said she did not know where she had gone.
Other locals we asked had no information either. But several people in neighboring villages said it was common knowledge that many women in the area, including in their own villages, had been bought from southwestern China. Some called it sad; others were matter-of-fact.
Still, it was clear that talking about such trafficking could be risky.
As we got closer to Dongji, a black Volkswagen began tailing us. Then, at least eight villagers surrounded us, calling us race traitors (we are both of Chinese heritage) and at times pushing my colleague. One said that if we had been men, they would have beaten us.
They eventually escorted us back to the main road after we called the police. Along the way, one man said it was in our own interest to be more cautious.
“If you two were taken to the market and sold,” he said, “then what would you do?”
Step 2: Silence Discussion
After the woman’s story emerged in January 2022, the controls were tightest in Dongji. But the government sprang into action across the country to suppress the debate that followed.
Legal scholars observed that the penalty for buying a trafficked woman — three years’ imprisonment — was less than that for selling an endangered bird. Others noted that judges have denied divorce applications from women known to have been abused or trafficked, and that the government has repeatedly ignored calls to criminalize marital rape.
To halt such conversations, the police tracked down people like He Peirong, a veteran human rights activist, who had traveled 200 miles to the area around Dongji to try to look for other trafficked women.
After she returned home, police officers knocked on her door, asking her why she had gone. They visited her roughly 20 times over the next month, forcing her to delete online posts about her trip and threatening to arrest her.
They also named journalists she had been in contact with, to show they were watching her communications. They even took her to nearby Anhui Province on a forced “vacation” — a common tactic used to control dissidents’ movements.
Similar crackdowns were taking place farther away. A lawyer named Lu Tingge, a resident of Hebei Province, about 600 miles from Dongji, said in an interview that a Jiangsu official had traveled to his city, urging him to withdraw a petition he’d submitted for more information about the case (he refused, but said he never received the information).
Bookstores that put up displays recommending feminist reading were forced to remove them. Numerous online articles about the woman were censored; China Digital Times, a censorship tracker, archived at least 100 of them, though there were many more.
The campaign even extended overseas. A woman living abroad said in an interview that the police called her parents in China after she posted photos of herself in chains online.
Ms. He, the veteran activist, realized that the government was more worried about feminism than she had thought. She had been detained previously for other activism, but this monthslong pressure “far surpassed that,” she said.
Step 3: Detain Those Who Persist
To avoid arrest, Ms. He stopped posting about the case. She eventually left China for Thailand.
Those who refused to stop, however, suffered the consequences.
Two other women also traveled to Jiangsu after the video emerged, to visit the chained woman at the hospital. Identifying themselves on social media only by nicknames, Wuyi and Quanmei, they said they were just ordinary women showing solidarity.
“Your sisters are coming,” Wuyi posted.
They were barred from entering the hospital or the village, according to videos on Wuyi’s Weibo. So they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.
They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.
Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.
“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.
About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.
The Resistance Goes Into Hiding
After Wuyi’s disappearance, the few voices still speaking out fell silent.
But the activism has not evaporated, only moved underground.
It includes people like Monica, a young woman who asked to be identified only by a first name. We met at her home, where she asked that I not bring my cellphone to avoid surveillance. Soft-spoken but assured, she recounted how police scrutiny forced her to embrace new tactics.
When the chained woman story erupted, she joined an online group of several hundred people that decided to conduct research on the trafficking of women with mental disabilities in China.
Within days, the police tracked down and interrogated participants. At around the same time, anonymous articles appeared online that doxxed some members of the group and labeled them “extreme feminists.” The group disbanded.
But the intimidation only made Monica angrier.
So a few months later, Monica and several others quietly regrouped, using an encrypted messaging platform. Rather than campaign publicly, they tried to impose pressure on the government behind the scenes.
For weeks, they studied hundreds of court cases and news stories about women who had been abused or trafficked. They wrote a 20-page report explaining the chained woman episode and laying out suggestions for reform. In July 2022, they submitted it anonymously to a U.N. committee reviewing China’s record on disability rights.
They later submitted similar reports to two other U.N. committees. A member of one of the committees, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the reports were crucial sources of independent information from China. That person had not heard of the chained woman before.
In May 2023, U.N. officials raised the chained woman’s story during a public meeting with Chinese government representatives. The government said it had imprisoned Mr. Dong and that the woman was being cared for. Still, Monica felt proud — and emboldened: “You feel that you can still do some risky things.”
“Feminism in China really is the most vocal and active movement. It’s also very hard to completely scatter or kill off,” she said. “I think the authorities are right to be worried.”
Others have tried to subtly keep the chained woman’s legacy alive in other ways. An all-female band released a song called “So Who Has My Key?” An artist spent 365 days wearing a chain around her neck. A writer published a thinly disguised retelling of Snow White.
In December, a woman whose family had reported her missing 13 years ago was found living with a man to whom she had borne two children. The authorities claimed the woman had a disability and the man had “taken her in” — the same language officials used in an early report about the chained woman.
Social media users erupted, accusing the government of glossing over trafficking again.
Then the censors stepped in and stifled that discussion, too.
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
As U.S. Tariffs Become Reality, Canadians Prepare for Economic Pain
The trucks that carry about $300 million worth of auto parts each day over the bridge from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit are still rolling as usual. But in the aftermath of President Trump’s decision to impose 25 percent tariffs on most categories of Canadian exports, the mood in Windsor, like all of Canada, was transformed.
Mr. Trump’s move has ignited a sense of economic anxiety and anger among Canadians about how they are being treated by their neighbor, ally and best customer. Most are still puzzling over Mr. Trump’s motivations and objectives for the tariffs, as well as his comments about annexing Canada as the 51st state.
And as they turned their attention to getting the potentially crippling tariffs, and a 10 percent levy on Canadian oil and gas and some minerals, lifted, politicians, business people and ordinary Canadians say that the relationship between the two countries will never return to what it once was.
Flavio Volpe, the head of a Canadian auto-parts maker trade group, said that his members could start shutting down factories in days, and that he feels betrayed by the United States.
“We’ve built two societies on the same values,” said Mr. Volpe, who is also a member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Council on Canada-U.S. Relations. “The man in the White House did a U-turn and drove right over us.”
Mr. Trudeau and anxious business leaders throughout Canada said that their country’s focus must be on ending the tariffs as quickly as possible.
Most forecasts project that Canada’s export-dependent economy will be sent into a recession, although they differ on timing and its initial severity.
“We have a limited experience for this magnitude of a trade shock,” the Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest financial institution, said this week. Some Canadians reached back for comparison to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, which raised the average U.S. import duty to a staggering 59.1 percent. Many economists believe that they worsened the Great Depression, but the two countries’ economies were far less integrated at that time.
Aside from oil and gas, Canada’s largest export sector is the auto industry. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump suggested that the only way out of tariffs for the sector is to move all of its production to the United States. Aside from abandoning a skilled work force, that would require billions of dollars in new investments.
Historically, automotive trade has been largely balanced between the United States and Canada. Parts often swirl around between Canada, the United States and Mexico, sometimes crossing borders repeatedly before winding up in vehicles in a dealer’s showroom.
Mr. Volpe, of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association in Canada, said that, aside from the tariffs, trade remained unchanged on Tuesday, an assessment backed up by the usual migration of trucks to the Ambassador Bridge.
The 25 percent tariffs are being paid by the importers, either other parts makers or automakers. Most contracts allow an automaker to deduct tariffs it pays when settling a parts company’s bill.
Mr. Volpe said that those deductions will make parts suppliers, which have generally have single-digit profit margins, instantly and deeply unprofitable.
He expects that most of his members can cover those losses from their cash reserves for about a week. After that, they will be forced to stop shipments.
“No one is going to burn up their cash reserve for the president of the United States,” he said.
For more parts, automakers usually have no alternative suppliers, let alone ones in the United States. Setting up new suppliers would take time and substantial investment. The result, experts say, will be a parts shortage that rapidly cascades into assembly-line shutdowns. Thousands of workers in Canada, the United States and Mexico would be left idle.
Some industries began idling small numbers of workers before the tariffs came into effect.
Bill Slater, the president of a United Steelworkers local in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, said that Algoma Steel laid off about 20 of his members who are salaried employees, citing the tariffs. He said that a number of probationary hourly workers were also let go by the mill.
Truck drivers had a mixed experience. Stephen Laskowski, the president of the Ontario Trucking Association, said that some had a surge in business as companies moved to get products into the United States before the tariffs came into effect, while others were laying off drivers because customers were canceling shipments.
Canada’s forestry industry knows tariffs all too well. Special U.S. duties on softwood lumber go back decades and were a factor in Canada seeking the 1989 free trade agreement with the United States, which was later expanded to include Mexico. (Canada has repeatedly failed to get an exemption from the U.S. trade complaints system that imposes the softwood lumber tariffs.)
But Kurt Niquidet, the president of the British Columbia Council of Forest Industries, said that adding the 25 percent tariff “really puts us into unprecedented territory.”
Lumber mills in the western province are facing a dizzying array of tariffs. This week’s 25 percent tariff is on top of a 14.4 percent tariff that the U.S. government expects to raise this summer, to more than 27 percent. Then Mr. Trump announced last weekend that he’s opened an investigation into lumber imports that could result in even more tariffs.
While the United States supplies about 70 percent of its own lumber, Mr. Niquidet, an economist, said that American forests and mills cannot replace all the lumber from Canada, nor can it be sourced from other countries.
“There will still be imports from Canada,” he said. “Prices in the U.S. will rise.” Some Canadian lumber mills, however, may not survive the trade assault, he added.
While Mr. Trudeau speculated that Mr. Trump was seeking a “total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” Mr. Volpe said he was not sure it’s that complicated. “If it looks like he is dismantling the structure of the postwar economy, then he is,” Mr. Volpe said. “What are you going to do about it?” Some Canadians believe that their country is simply being used as part of Mr. Trump’s plan to fund substantial U.S. tax cuts with tariffs.
Jean Simard, the president of the Aluminum Association of Canada, fought a successful battle over the 10 percent tariff on Canadian exports of the metal Mr. Trump enacted in during his first administration. Now Mr. Simard is attempting to fend off additional tariffs that Mr. Trump has promised to put on top of Tuesday’s 25 percent. He said that he believes the president is telling the world: “This is what I’m able to do to my closest allies — think about what’s awaiting you.”
Mr. Simard added: “It’s an old barbarian approach to war.”
As the tariffs were rolled out, actions against American goods quickly came into play. Government-owned liquor stores, including in Ontario, pulled U.S. beer, wine and spirits from off their shelves, and that province canceled a 100 million Canadian dollar ($69 million) contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service to provide internet in rural areas.
Some Canadians are also vowing not to travel south, a decision perhaps also informed by the decline of the Canadian dollar brought on by the tariffs.
Most winters, Lee Miller, a retired electrician from Saint John, New Brunswick, would be traveling in his motor home through sunny warm states, including Florida.
“As soon as Trump started talking tariffs, I said, ‘Nope, not going,’” Mr. Miller said. After canceling this year’s trip, he plans not to enter the United States as long as Mr. Trump is president. That will, however, mean missed visits with friends and family who live across the border.
“This is one of those things that tears families apart,” he said.
‘We Have Given Him Everything’: Trump’s Tariffs Stun Mexico
Up to the last minute, Isaac Presburger, like a lot of other Mexican businessmen, still could not believe that President Trump would deliver on his promise to hit Mexico with tariffs. Little did it matter that Mr. Trump had announced that very day that he would go ahead with the planned taxes.
“I am still incredulous,” said Mr. Presburger, director of sales at Preslow, a family-run apparel business in Mexico. “We know by now that Trump pressures you so you give him what he wants. We have given him everything and he has not let loose of his grip.”
In response to Mr. Trump’s threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexican products, Mexico made a major effort: Leaders agreed to send more than two dozen alleged cartel heads to be tried in the United States, a departure from the government’s previous stance on extraditions.
President Claudia Sheinbaum dispatched thousands of National Guard troops to the state of Sinaloa, the hub of fentanyl trafficking, where they seized vast amounts of the synthetic opioid and busted hundreds of laboratories. She sent thousands more to the U.S. border, contributing to a plunge in the number of illegal crossings.
Ms. Sheinbaum bent further than anyone had expected to show the Trump administration that her government was serious about meeting U.S. demands, analysts say.
And yet, in spite of it all, the tariffs struck after midnight on Tuesday.
That has left people in Mexico’s government, business and civil society reeling, but also feeling exasperated, even betrayed.
“We are emphatic,” Ms. Sheinbaum said in a news conference on Tuesday morning, hours after Mr. Trump’s tariffs took effect on its biggest trading partners, including Mexico and Canada. “There is no reason, justification or excuse that supports this decision that will affect our people and nations.”
She ticked off what she described as her government’s “significant actions” against organized crime, and noted a 50 percent drop in fentanyl seizures between October and January at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We have worked and delivered results on security matters,” she said.
The tariffs represent not just a rift in the fabric of two economies that have been deeply interwoven for decades, but a sudden departure from a relationship that had long been collaborative and from what many in Mexico expected would take place: a last-minute deal.
Through late last week, a delegation from Mexico had been frantically negotiating with officials in Washington, and leaders had been projecting confidence. Even the financial markets held steady in Mexico.
Mexico’s economy minister, Marcelo Ebrard, posted to social media on Friday, “Mexico and the United States have a great future working together,” with three thumbs-up emojis. Business leaders across the country shared the same optimism until Monday.
José de Jesús Rodríguez, president of Mexico City’s chamber of commerce, said Mr. Trump’s decision surprised him, particularly in light of the American leader’s suggestion that he would not impose tariffs if Mexico produced results on migration and drug trafficking. The results it delivered included a barrage of high-level arrests and the handover of the 29 accused drug bosses that the U.S. government had long sought to get on its own soil.
But Mr. Trump, whose criticism of Mexico had focused on illegal fentanyl, shifted his terms on Monday, saying that Canada and Mexico needed to relocate automotive factories and other manufacturing to the United States. “What they have to do is build their car plants, frankly, and other things in the United States, in which case they have no tariffs,” he said.
“It is extremely disappointing and frustrating,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “The United States broke their word, and it dictates the future of our commercial relationship.”
“It’s time for us to look to other regions,” he added.
Ms. Sheinbaum said she had a call scheduled with Mr. Trump for Thursday, and told reporters on Tuesday that if the tariffs remained in effect afterward, her government would go ahead with a number countermeasures, including retaliatory taxes, which would be announced on Sunday. Canada also announced reciprocal tariffs.
“We don’t want to enter into a trade war,” she said. “That only affects the people.”
Ms. Sheinbaum’s approval ratings in Mexico have soared, with many praising her coolheaded approach to handling Mr. Trump, who called her a “wonderful woman.”
But the trade wars that are now underway will test not only that relationship but how much the government can insulate its economy and its population from chaos and pain.
Mr. Presburger, the Preslow sales director, said that he still hoped the tariffs wouldn’t last more than a few days, or that Mr. Trump would change his mind. Otherwise, “it will be disastrous for Mexico.”
The United States buys more than three quarters of Mexico’s exports, and tariffs will hit manufacturing, agriculture and other businesses, immediately disrupting the supply chain and most likely raising the cost of Mexican goods sold in the United States.
Just hours before the tariffs went into effect, Manuel Sotelo, president of the association of transporters of Ciudad Juárez, said the uncertainty hovered over the many who truck goods into the United States.
He said if tariffs applied to all Mexican products, they would affect everyone. But if they also applied to raw materials coming from businesses on the border, “then the situation is going to get worse for the region.”
He said the transportation industry could not last even a week if trade were frozen.
When Mr. Trump hit Mexico with tariffs during his first term, it carried out a surgical response, targeting the retaliatory tariffs at products that were produced in Republican states considered part of Trump’s base — such as Kentucky bourbon.
The tariffs were lifted after about a year.
Preparing for the worst, Mexican business owners and trade groups were already starting to scramble.
Antonio Lancaster, president of the council of industrial chambers of the state of Jalisco, one of the largest exporters of food and beverages — including tequila — to the United States, said the chambers’ leaders were already in talks with the state and federal government about plans to bolster local production and pursue other export markets.
“We saw this coming, and this means we will pursue a rearrangement of our exports,” Mr. Lancaster said. He added, “We will end up exporting to Europe, Asia or anywhere else.”
Businessmen like Mr. Lancaster argued that the tariffs will ultimately end up hurting American consumers as well as Mexican producers.
“We all lose here,” he said.
Jesús Manuel Salayandía, coordinator of a business group on the border, said that corporate leaders mostly based in the United States, have been meeting to plan their response to the tariffs.
“They are analyzing whether they will move to Central America, to the southern part of the country, if they will return to the United States, or if they will automate or robotize certain production lines,” he said. “All of that is being considered.”
Mr. Salayandía said that the Mexican government, perhaps expecting a last-minute deal, had not worked to prepare.
They had been thinking, “Let’s wait for Trump to tell us what will happen,” he said. “But they’re not working on a plan to strengthen the domestic market or to offer incentives to the companies already here.”
Marcelo Vázquez, state delegate of the National Association of Importers and Exporters of the Mexican Republic in Chihuahua, said for the last few weeks some companies had workers on duty virtually around the clock to export goods into the United States before the tariffs came into effect.
“But that’s just an aspirin for the headache; it doesn’t really solve the problem.”
Rocío Gallegos contributed reporting from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
Five weeks ago, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, delivered a routine speech blasting the “hegemonic, egoistic” United States at the helm of the “collective West.” The worldview of the 74-year-old veteran diplomat has since undergone some head-spinning changes.
In an interview on Russian state television on Sunday, Mr. Lavrov listed the ills that Europe — not America — had brought upon the world. The United States, in his telling, had gone from evil mastermind to innocent bystander.
“Colonization, wars, crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon, World War I, Hitler,” Mr. Lavrov said. “If we look at history in retrospect, the Americans did not play any instigating, let alone incendiary, role.”
As President Trump turns decades of U.S. foreign policy upside down, another dizzying swing is taking place in Russia, both in the Kremlin and on state-controlled television: The United States, the new message goes, is not that bad after all.
Almost overnight, it’s Europe — not the United States — that has become the source of instability in the Russian narrative. On his marquee weekly show on the Rossiya-1 channel Sunday night, the anchor Dmitri Kiselyov described the “party of war” in Europe as outmatched by the “great troika” of the United States, Russia and China that will form “the new structure of the world.”
For more than a decade, the United States was the Kremlin propaganda machine’s main boogeyman — the “hegemon,” the “puppeteer” and the “master across the ocean.” It was seeking Russia’s destruction by pushing Europeans, Ukrainians and terrorists into conflict with Moscow.
After Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, Russian officials first said not much would change.
“The difference, other than terminology, is small,” Mr. Lavrov said in that Jan. 30 speech, comparing the Trump and Biden administrations.
But then came the phone call on Feb. 12 between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the talks between the White House and the Kremlin in Saudi Arabia, the vote at the United Nations in which America sided with Russia, and the berating of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the Oval Office last week.
In a matter of weeks, it became clear that the second Trump presidency had the potential to deliver far more of a pro-Russian foreign policy than the first one did.
Mr. Putin has led the shift in tone. The leader who used to castigate the American-led West for seeking to “dismember and plunder Russia” last week proposed that the United States mine Russian rare earth metals and help develop aluminum production in Siberia. It was part of Mr. Putin’s outreach to Mr. Trump as he dangled the potential for vast wealth from Russian resources.
On Friday, hours before Mr. Trump harangued Mr. Zelensky at the White House, Mr. Putin sounded his new, pro-American message in the unlikeliest of places: the annual meeting of Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the F.S.B., which has been at the vanguard of Russia’s shadow war against the West.
Mr. Putin said talks with the Trump administration “inspire certain hopes,” praised it for its “pragmatism” and called on the spies in attendance to resist attempts “to disrupt or compromise the dialogue that has begun.”
The whiplash in ties with Washington was so stark that Russian state television on Sunday showed a reporter asking the Kremlin’s spokesman how it was possible that “a couple of months ago we were publicly saying that we were almost enemies.”
“This, indeed, couldn’t have been imagined,” the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, replied, marveling at the shift. American foreign policy, he added, now “coincides with our vision in many ways.”
The Kremlin’s message makers are struggling to help Russians make sense of it all. Some commentators are dredging up historical precedent, going as far back as Catherine the Great’s refusal to help Britain put down the American Revolution. Others say it’s the American voter who changed.
“The American people got tired of global empire,” a state TV talk-show stalwart, the filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov, explained last week.
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In an interview with The New York Times, Yevgeny Popov — whose show, “60 Minutes,” is the most popular daily political program on Russian state TV — insisted that talk of cooperating with the United States was not extraordinary because American companies had done business even in the Soviet Union.
“These are quite natural processes happening here,” Mr. Popov said. “We want peaceful, constructive and pragmatic and, most importantly, equal relations with the U.S.”
Still, Mr. Popov pointed out that American weapons were killing Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s battlefields, and that he did not believe there could soon be a friendly relationship with a country whose “tanks were firing on our people.”
Some guests on his show have gone further. Aleksei Zhuravlyov, a firebrand lawmaker known for threatening the United States with nuclear annihilation, said on “60 Minutes” last week that Russia could “make friends with America and rule the world.”
“Trump needs us,” Mr. Zhuravlyov said. “Do we need Trump? We do. Do our interests coincide? They do. Against whom? Against the European Union.”
Underlying Russia’s interest in rapprochement with the United States are a grudging respect for the country and extensive personal ties, especially among the cultural and commercial elite. Ivan I. Kurilla, a scholar of U.S.-Russia relations at Wellesley College, said Russian and Soviet rulers long saw the United States as a nation worth emulating — whether in its economic prowess or its swagger on the world stage.
“This duality of the view of America — it’s been like this for a long time,” said Mr. Kurilla, who was a professor at the European University at St. Petersburg until last year.
Mr. Popov, who used to be a Russian state television correspondent in New York, ticked off some of the things he believed Russia and the United States have in common: a strong executive, protectionist policies, large armies, market economies “plus or minus” and powerful law enforcement agencies.
“We both have a police state in the good sense of the word,” Mr. Popov said in a video call last week as he made his way through Moscow traffic. He concluded, addressing Americans, “If you want to understand what the Russians think, look in the mirror.”
The sudden prospect of improved ties with the United States cheered the Russian public, which pollsters say is increasingly eager for an end to the war in Ukraine and sees negotiations with Washington as a prerequisite.
The Levada Center, an independent pollster based in Moscow, found in February that 75 percent of Russians would support an immediate end to the war, the highest reading since 2023, and that 85 percent approved of talks with the United States. Hopes of sanctions relief and the return of American investment helped drive up the Russian stock market by as much as 10 percent after the Trump-Putin call on Feb. 12.
To some of the most fervent supporters of Russia’s war, the embrace of Washington has smacked of betrayal, given that Mr. Putin has long described the invasion as a proxy war against American aggression. On the Telegram social messaging app, Russia’s pro-war bloggers expressed surprise over Mr. Putin’s proposal last week for cooperating with American companies to extract the country’s natural resources.
A nationalist Telegram blog with more than a million followers, Two Majors, wondered how talk of “the evil desire of the damned Yankees to steal Russia’s natural resources” had morphed into discussion of “mutually beneficial cooperation with American partners.”
But for Mr. Putin himself, there may be a wisp of internal consistency in the swing toward Washington. He has generally avoided labeling the United States as a whole as Russia’s enemy.
Rather, Mr. Putin has said it is the Western “neoliberal elite” that tries to impose its “strange” values on the world and seeks Russia’s destruction, while depicting American conservatives as Russia’s friends. It’s a mirror image of the propaganda tropes of the Soviet Union, when American progressives were cast as Moscow’s allies.
“In the United States,” Mr. Putin said in 2022, “there’s a very strong part of the public who maintain traditional values, and they’re with us. We know about this.”
Milana Mazaeva and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
The tutelage began last Friday, soon after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine suffered through a humiliating dressing down at the White House, courtesy of President Trump.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain suggested that Mr. Zelensky return to the White House to mend fences with Mr. Trump. That idea was scotched by both sides, who concluded it would be better to let tempers cool, according to a British official familiar with the discussion.
But it was the beginning of five days of prodding and counseling from Mr. Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, who both told Mr. Zelensky that he needed to change his approach to Mr. Trump, according to the British official and French officials close to Mr. Macron. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The conversations took on greater urgency after the White House announced on Monday that it would halt American aid to Ukraine.
After talking to both leaders on Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky made a significant course correction, one taken by many world leaders when trying to win over Mr. Trump: He offered effusive praise and gratitude, gushing over the assistance America has provided to Ukraine’s war effort.
He also sought to assuage the American president’s unsupported claims that Mr. Zelensky did not want peace, going so far as to outline specific steps that could be taken on a path toward a settlement — like a cessation of missile strikes. Ukraine was “ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on X.
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