Trump says Ukraine lacks leverage. His own officials say otherwise.

KYIV, Ukraine — Senior White House officials publicly placed Ukraine’s military ahead of allied counterparts in Europe across four venues last week, and in some respects ranked Kyiv ahead of the United States itself, even as U.S. President Donald Trump has continued to dismiss Ukraine’s military strength.The Ukrainian armed forces are “the strongest, most powerful armed forces in all of Europe,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week, citing a five-to-one Russian-to-Ukrainian casualty rate and four years of battlefield adaptation.The necessity of fighting the war, Rubio said, has pushed Ukrainians to develop “new tactics, new techniques, new equipment, new technology that is creating a sort of hybrid asymmetrical warfare.”U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the Senate Armed Services Committee the same week that Ukraine has fused drones, sensors and weapons into a single command network running across the front, while U.S. Army systems remain “compartmentalized, isolated and ineffective against modern threats.”“Ukraine’s Delta common operating system, their modular open system architecture command and control system, is absolutely incredible,” Driscoll testified.“It fully integrates every single drone, every sensor and every shooting platform into just one single network. Ours does not.”The shift in tone comes as allied partners press Kyiv for help countering Iranian drones, and as several countries, including the U.S., are seeking to finalize new weapons deals to route Ukrainian drone technology into joint ventures across the West.It is a sharp turnaround from a second Trump administration that came in saying Kyiv had no cards to play. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent the months since Trump assumed office telling European allies the continent’s defense is their problem, not Washington’s, and Trump has continued to frame NATO as a debtor to the U.S. rather than a partner. In March, Trump continued to downplay Ukrainian dominance in the drone and coun