Closing summary
… and on that note, shortly before the leaders will start arriving for their opening dinner in The Hague, it’s a wrap for today!
Nato secretary general Mark Rutte has urged Europe to “make your defences so strong that no one dares to attack you,” as he rallied around the new proposed 5% GDP spending target. “It is simply unthinkable that Russia, with an economy 25 times smaller than Nato’s, should be able to outproduce and outgun us,” he said (13:54, 16:34).
Meanwhile, US president Donald Trump revealed a congratulatory text message he received from Rutte, praising him for “something no one else dared to do” on Iran and promising him he was “flying into another big success in The Hague” (15:44)
He is set to arrive this evening after injecting some uncertainty over whether the US would abide by the mutual defense guarantees outlined in the Nato treaty by saying the US commitment to Nato’s Article 5 “depends on your definition” of the mechanism (16:29).
But his most senior diplomat at Nato, Matthew Whittaker, insisted “The United States isn’t going anywhere” (11:54), after Nato’s Rutte also said that allies should “stop worrying so much” about the US and focus on investing more money.
Meanwhile,
Meanwhile, European leaders largely backed the new 5% GDP target, with some – including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (9:26) and Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen (16:50) – even saying the proposed timeline risked being too slow, and Czech Republic’s Petr Pavel saying the ramp up reflects the needs “we were neglecting for decades” (16:48).
German chancellor Friedrich Merz said “it is no exaggeration to call this summit historic” given its importance to increasing defence spending among the members of the alliance (12:33).
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni told the Italian parliament that if the country spends more on defence to meet its international commitments, the extra outlays should benefit Italian companies rather than foreign ones (12:06).
The Nato summit was hit by major train disruption in the Netherlands, with the government (9:56) and the police saying it could have been a deliberate act of sabotage (16:26).
Elsewhere,
President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the top US general in Europe has just said he believed Ukraine could prevail against Russia’s more than three-year-old invasion (17:12).
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy is expected to meet with Trump on the sidelines of the summit, just hours after the latest Russian strike killed at least 17 and wounded more than 200 (18:26).
The summit proper gets under way tomorrow, and we will obviously bring you all the key updates on Europe Live.
If you want to follow live updates from Trump’s arrival at Nato, you can tune into our US politics live blog here:
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Updated
Russian missile attack kills 17, hours before Zelenskyy's attendance at Nato
As European leaders get to The Hague, the latest report confirms that at least 17 people were killed in the Russian missile attack in southeastern Ukraine on Tuesday, a stark reminder of the threat posed by Russia.
The main two-part strike killed 15 and wounded more than 200 in the regional capital Dnipro, said governor Serhiy Lysak, where a blast wave showered scores of train passengers with broken glass, Reuters reported.
Among the wounded were at least 18 children, Lysak added.
Reuters said that two further people were also killed in the town of Samar, around 10 km (six miles) from Dnipro, Lysak said, adding that an infrastructure facility was damaged.
