LONDON — Europe faces “crunch time” on the war in Ukraine , a former European president told NBC News, as the continent battles internal division, Russian threats and open hostility from the United States.

Leaders on the continent are feeling “genuine fear and distrust regarding the United States,” Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who led Estonia for a decade until 2016, told NBC News in an interview Thursday. But he also warned that Europe’s internal division “ultimately shows the weakness” of the bloc, and he feared what might happen “unless we start getting our act together.”

His comments came hours before European powers held urgent negotiations Friday on how to keep Ukraine’s war effort alive and before President Donald Trump published his National Security Strategy that spelled out in

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