European leaders convened in Paris on Monday in a bid to craft a unified response to the upheaval wrought by Trump, who has sidelined them in talks with Russia about negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Trump’s defense chief Pete Hegseth last week issued a stark warning that the presence of American troops in Europe would not “last forever,” threatening to upend a 75-year security arrangement.
Rinkēvičs, Latvia’s former foreign minister until he was elected president in 2023, has long sounded the alarm about Russian aggression, well before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the winter of 2022.
For Latvia, a small Baltic nation of 2 million people bordering Russia and once occupied by the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s defense is widely seen as a matter of national survival. Riga regularly hosts rotations of U.S. troops as part of efforts to shore up NATO’s eastern flank.
