BRUSSELS, March 5 - European Union leaders plan to hold emergency talks on Thursday to agree ways to quickly increase their military budgets after the Trump administration signaled that Europe must take care of its own security and also suspended assistance to Ukraine, The Associated Press reported.

In just over a month, President Donald Trump has overturned old certainties about U.S. reliability as a security partner, as he embraces Russia and withdraws American support for Ukraine.

On Monday, Trump ordered a pause to U.S. military supplies to Ukraine as he sought to press President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to engage in negotiations to end the war with Russia, bringing fresh urgency to the EU summit in Brussels.

“Europe faces a clear and present danger on a scale that none of us have seen in our adult lifetime. Some of our fundamental assumptions are being undermined to their very core,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned in a letter to the EU’s 27 leaders, who will consider ways to access more money for defense spending and ease restrictions on it.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for the EU on Thursday will be to take a united stance at a moment when it’s fractured, since much of what the bloc does requires unanimous support.

Whatever happens, the meeting is not expected to address Ukraine’s most pressing needs.

It is not aimed at urgently drumming up more arms and ammunition to fill any supply vacuum created by the U.S. freeze. Nor will it unblock the estimated 183 billion euros ($196 billion) in frozen Russian assets held in a Belgian clearing house, a pot of ready cash that could be seized.

Ukraine’s armed forces, meanwhile, are still battling to slow Russia’s advances along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, especially in the eastern Donetsk region. Tens of thousands of soldiers and more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed.

The focus of Thursday’s summit will be finances, and how to set the EU up as quickly as possible to provide for its own security, and help Ukraine, while breaking with decades of dependence on the U.S. defense umbrella.

“In view of the increasing threat situation, it is clear to us that Europe … must now very quickly make very big efforts, very quickly, to strengthen the defense capability of our country and the European continent,” Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said Tuesday.

The prospective partners in Germany’s next government are seeking to loosen the nation’s rules on running up debt to allow for higher defense spending.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte — who fears that Russia’s armed forces might be capable of launching an attack on another European country by the end of the decade — has warned that U.S. allies will have to spend more than 3% of gross domestic product on their military budgets.

The Trump administration is demanding that the Europeans spend as much as 5%, well beyond the NATO benchmark of at least 2%. Seven European allies still fall short of even that target. The U.S. spends around 3.4%, according to NATO figures, and a Pentagon audit that could reduce that is pending.

Von der Leyen has proposed that the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, raise up to 150 billion euros ($161 billion) on financial markets that would be loaned to member countries buy new military equipment for themselves, or to send to Ukraine.

The commission would also aim to free up funds from other sectors of the bloc’s massive long-term budget and to relax its stringent debt rules so that each country could invest up to 1.5% more of their GDP on defense, should they want to. (ap/ez)