Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's Under Secretary of War for Policy, has confirmed that he was personally involved in high-level discussions about ensuring Ukraine receives the weapons it needs. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations on March 4, Colby said he took part in the talks during a recent visit to Brussels, where he "heard from the new minister, Fedorov, about their plan and so forth."

"Hvylya" reports, citing his appearance at the CFR, that despite his personal engagement, Colby's overarching message was unmistakable: Ukraine's defense is now fundamentally Europe's responsibility. "It's really got to be Europe stepping up," Colby stated bluntly.

Colby pointed to the PURL system - ordered built by the President and facilitated by the Pentagon - as the mechanism for transferring American weaponry to Ukraine through Europe. The system enables the sale of US weapons to European nations, which then channel them to Ukraine. This structure, Colby argued, is not a workaround but the intended model: the US provides the industrial capacity and the framework, Europe provides the funding and the political commitment.

He pushed back against the argument that returning to pre-Trump defense arrangements would solve the problem. "Some of the logic of the argument is, 'Oh, hey, if we just went back to normal or something like that, went back to the old ways, we could keep doing things the way we've been doing,'" Colby said. "And it's like, no, no, no, we've got to lean forward into a world in which not only are we spending more and producing more, but Europeans and Japanese and Australians and Koreans and New Zealanders are all spending more."

Colby acknowledged the constraints driving this shift. "We have unbounded potential, but we do not have unbounded resources at this particular precise point in time," he said, citing limits in the defense industrial base. He warned that trying to "be super tough everywhere all the time" would leave the US vulnerable - precisely the trap he accused the previous administration of falling into. The alternative, in Colby's framing, is "building a grand coalition of strong and capable allies" - the model that, he argued, "brought the original Cold War to a successful conclusion."

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