When Lithuania’s Jovita Neliupšienė was born in 1980, in the city of Panevėžys, her country was still part of the Soviet Union, and Donald Trump was a rising Manhattan real-estate developer.

Back then, the idea that Russia would one day invade Ukraine—or that Trump would sit in the Oval Office, let alone inflict punishing tariffs on America’s closest allies—was unthinkable.

Fast-forward 45 years later, and Neliupšienė, now the European Union’s top envoy to the United States, faces a populist president who admires Russia’s Vladimir Putin and opposes free trade.

“We are all diplomats, so while we represent our interests, we must have proper communication regardless of the administration,” Neliupšienė said in a recent interview. “Professional diplomats always keep the channels open, because the choice of the American people has been made, and we don’t question it.”

Such careful talk is a far cry from the lofty sentiments Neliupšienė expressed in February 2024 on presenting her credentials to then-President Joe Biden. At that time, she called the Brussels-Washington partnership “a defining factor of the global order since World War II,” noting that EU-US relations “embody the ideals of peace, freedom, democracy, stability, prosperity, human rights and development, not only for those living on our shores but also for the rest of the world.”

Neliupšienė is the first woman ever to represent the 27-member EU in Washington. She studied at Lithuania’s Vilnius University, graduating in 2004 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in international relations and diplomacy. Following stints at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at Lithuania’s embassy in Belarus, she became a professor. Her doctoral dissertation was titled “National self-awareness and the formation of statehood: The experience of the CIS countries.”

In 2008, the future ambassador studied at Nebraska’s Creighton University, and in 2009, she became an advisor to Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė. In 2012, after the departure of Darius Semaška, she took over as the president’s chief advisor and head of the Foreign Policy Group. Three years later, Neliupšienė became Lithuania’s ambassador to the EU in 2015, serving in that position until 2020.

An outspoken critic of Putin’s policies in Ukraine, she—along with 88 other EU officials—have been banned from Russia since 2015, the year after Putin sent his troops into the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

But it’s unlikely the ambassador would set foot in Russia anyway. “I’ve never traveled there to check if I’m still sanctioned,” she joked.

EU investment in security long overdue, says ambassador

As a Lithuanian, Neliupšienė has reasons to fear aggression by Moscow. Her country, smaller than West Virginia, is one of three Baltic states that—along with Latvia and Estonia—were forcibly taken over by the USSR and turned into Soviet republics at the outset of World War II.

Two years ago, Vilnius hosted the 2023 NATO Summit, and in 2024, the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington celebrated 100 years of continuous operation.

Meanwhile, besides the nearly €1 billion in government and private assistance Lithuania has given Ukraine since the start of the war, the Lithuanian people have opened up their homes to Ukrainian refugees. Some 78,000 Ukrainian citizens have settled in the small Baltic country, where they now comprise nearly 3% of Lithuania’s population.

“We were occupied by the Soviet Union for 50 years. Thanks to the United States, Lithuania’s occupation was never internationally recognized, giving us hope to fight for our freedom and democracy,” Neliupšienė said. “The Ukrainians feel exactly the same. They’re fighting a just cause. They were illegally attacked, and countries especially on the eastern border of the EU have their own historical experience dealing with Russia. There’s not really much trust. We know that if you appease the aggressor, he will march on.”

The warning signs have been evident for more than a decade yet were ignored, she said.

“Back in 2014, when Russia’s ‘little green men’ occupied Crimea, this was a very clear signal that it would not be the end of the story, but just the beginning. We should have learned the lesson. We should have invested more in our own defense and security, and we should have paid more attention to our energy independence as well,” Neliupšienė told The Washington Diplomat. “There’s a lot of things we should have done after the occupation of Crimea, but the most important is that Europe has changed. Europe is moving forward with investments in security.”

In early May, the EU announced an €800 billion REARM Europe defense package (roughly $840 billion) “to strengthen our capabilities across Europe and invest in defense innovation,” in the words of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She spoke only a week after Trump questioned both his allegiance to the continent as well as the defense of Ukraine.

According to the Associated Press, most of the money Von der Leyen is talking about would come from loosening the fiscal constraints the EU puts on budgetary spending to “allow member states to significantly increase their defense expenditures without triggering” punishing rules aimed at keeping deficits from going too far into the red. It would help member states to spend on defense without being forced to cut into social spending purely to keep within EU rules.

“So if member states would increase their defense spending by 1.5% of GDP on average, this could create fiscal space of close to €650 billion ($683 billion) over a period of four years,” von der Leyen said. This would be topped up by a loans program, controversially backed by the common EU budget, of €150 billion ($157 billion) to allow member states to invest in defense.

Neliupšienė: ‘Russia has to stop bombing Ukraine’

Lithuania, a nation of 2.8 million people, already spends just over 3% of its GDP on defense. Earlier this year, President Gitanas Nausėda vowed to increase that to 5-6% of GDP starting in 2026 due to Russian aggression.

Yet in recent days, the war has intensified, with massive Russian missile strikes on major Ukrainian cities followed by a brazen Ukrainian drone strike that destroyed 41 aircraft at five air bases deep inside Russia, from the Arctic Circle in the northwest to Siberia in Russia’s Far East—even as peace talks were underway in Istanbul. As of press time, Putin had yet to respond to the attack, which had reportedly been planned for well over a year.

According to the Washington Post, the operation—code-named Spiderweb—penetrated Russia’s homeland defenses and reportedly devastated the Russian military’s fleet of long-range warplanes critical to the Kremlin’s abilities to strike inside Ukraine and to project power globally. Ukraine claims to have damaged or destroyed some 40 Russian Tupolev bombers, which would amount to about one-third of its entire fleet.

The takeaway, concludes a Post op-ed: “Ukraine is showing Trump that it can use its wits and scrappiness to keep fighting; its cause is not lost. Kyiv also signaled to Trump and Ukraine’s European allies that, though Ukraine might be outmanned and outgunned, it still has the capacity to inflict considerable damage on Russia’s military and cannot be ignored in any negotiations.”

Added Neliupšienė: “If President Trump really wants to have a ceasefire in Ukraine, he cannot find a better ally than the EU. All 27 member states believe that Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine is an existential threat to our own security. We are very much on the same page that the war has to stop. And there’s a very easy way to stop the war: Russia has to stop bombing Ukraine.”

EU scrambles to talk Trump out of tariff war

While the Russia-Ukraine war has been going on for well over three years, the bitter tariff war between Washington and Brussels is a new development sparked totally by Trump. The president had threatened to impose a 50% tariff on all goods imported from Europe on June 1, but then pushed back the deadline to July 9, leaving EU negotiators scrambling for a solution.

Bruce Stokes, visiting senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, told the Associated Press on May 27 that “the Europeans have to come up with something to hopefully pacify him.”

Trump’s outbursts, he said, “are rooted in frustration with the EU that has little to do” with trade. “He doesn’t like the EU. He doesn’t like Germany.” Mary Lovely, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told AP she sees his threats and bluster as Trump’s way of negotiating, but that “in the short run, I don’t think 50% is going to be our reality.’’

Neliupšienė, noting that the EU-US economic partnership makes up 42% of global GDP, warned that Trump’s tariffs will devastate companies on both sides of the Atlantic—and that “we have to make sure our trade relations won’t fall apart because of our different views” on the subject.

“Tariffs will not solve any problems,” said the ambassador, explaining that she was not surprised at all by this turn of events. “At every rally during the campaign, President Trump spoke about tariffs. He was very clear that he likes tariffs and thinks this is the right way forward.”

Yet an op-ed published June 2 in The Hill warned that Trump’s “tariff tantrum” risks setting off a global depression.

“Europe could be pushed into a recession, and it could disrupt global stability,” wrote Brabim Karki. “By raising tariffs on the European Union—already a tense partner—the administration is undermining years of trade negotiations and risking a broader trade war that could hurt consumers, businesses and geopolitical cohesion. This isn’t just about dollars and cents; it’s about weakening trust in a world that’s already on edge.”

Karki added that “geopolitically, the timing couldn’t be worse. The EU, a key NATO partner, is already strained by Ukraine’s war and energy woes. Trump’s tariffs risk pushing allies like Poland and Germany — stalwart U.S. supporters — into a corner, forcing them to choose between economic pain and capitulation.”

Neliupšienė noted that “we have a 90-day pause on tariffs and we have to use this opportunity to negotiate some kind of settlement. Tariffs are taxes and will be passed on to consumers. It’s very difficult to commit investments if you don’t have clarity in business. I’ve had a lot of meetings with the administration and the business community on this.”

Other crises demand EU ambassador’s attention

Tariffs and the Russia-Ukraine war aren’t the only issues confronting the EU’s top envoy in Washington. Among the most urgent is the worsening situation in the Middle East.

“Many European countries are very concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which is not getting better,” Neliupšienė said, declining to elaborate further. She also would not discuss the possibility of US or Israeli military action against Iran in the event current talks over its nuclear weapons program fails.

Another concern is migration. The arrival of millions of mostly Muslim refugees from war-torn Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria over the last 10 years sparked a massive rejection of liberal EU policies on open borders and led to Britain’s exit from the EU in 2020. It’s also been a major factor in the rise of populist, far-right and sometimes openly xenophobic, anti-Islamist governments in Croatia, Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and, most recently, Poland.

“One of our major concerns is migration. We’ve been dealing with migration issues intensively since 2015,” she said. “For seven years, we have been negotiating our legal framework—how we document migrants and how we share the burden. Some countries are more exposed than others. And sometimes there are very difficult conversations. It’s a very complicated question.”

Neliupšienė agreed that immigration is a major focus of political debate throughout Europe, but that “elections are really a national issue of every member states, and we’re all democracies.”

Agnia Grigas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who’s also from Lithuania, said that even though “coming from a smaller country does not have the same gravitas as Germany or France,” the ambassador nonetheless can speak for the EU from a more neutral, Eurocentric position.

“Ambassador Neliupšienė is particularly well aware of the security threat Russia poses to the EU. Russia’s war in Ukraine was on the top of the transatlantic agenda when she started her position in January 2024,” Grigas told The Diplomat. “However, Europe’s security is greatly tied to its economic vitality, and thus finding a win-win economic partnership between the US and EU is critical if the democratic states want to maintain their lead against authoritarian states.”

She added: “This will not be an easy task given the showdown in US-EU tariff negotiations, but a task the ambassador is prepared to tackle. Lithuania has long been a very pro-US country that values America’s support, and a large Lithuanian-American community—including many Trump voters—provides more foundation for that relationship.”