The EU’s ‘re-arming’ plan is unserious – by Owen Matthews for The Spectator – 21.03.25
- Michael Julien
- Mar 24
- 4 min read
Hark ye now, O despots of the world and enemies of freedom: as the American beacon of democracy fades, Europe stands ready and willing to take its place as the arsenal of democracy. ‘We have agreed on a strategy for fully re-arming and re-equipping Europe,’ tweeted French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday. ‘We will fully restore our independence in the coming five years.’
Take that, Trump and Putin! Europe is stepping up to defend Ukraine and defend itself. To that end, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week announced a ReArm Europe plan that could see up to €800 billion poured into the defence sector over the next four years.
Small problem: that little weasel word ‘could’ is carrying a lot of weight. For a start, that €800 billion is not actual money allocated by nations’ budgets but potential debt. Rather than divert money from regular spending, for instance, the EU has merely tweaked its borrowing rules to exclude defence investment. What von der Leyen is actually saying is that potentially EU members could, if they chose, borrow that sum over and above their current spending commitments.
Realistically, how much is Europe actually willing to spend on re-arming? Last Tuesday von der Leyen came up with a new number – €150 billion of loans open to EU member states as part of a massive surge in defence spending. There was one proviso – 65 per cent of the equipment funded by this debt must come from suppliers in the EU, Norway or Ukraine. The rest could be spent in non-EU countries like the UK if they signed a security agreement with Brussels. But again, that’s potential future debt that EU taxpayers will have to service and eventually repay.
Debt aside, how about cash on the table, right now? On Friday EU leaders met in Brussels to discuss concrete plans for arming Ukraine. Europe’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas presented a €40 billion arms financing plan for Kyiv, paid over two years. But that proposal went overboard as Italy, France, Spain and Portugal rejected it.
New number: how about just €5 billion, focused on just the artillery ammunition component of the rejected €40 billion package? Also non, désolé. As one senior diplomat at the talks told Bloomberg, France and Italy had ‘balked at putting outsized numbers on the table.’
Also – did someone mention ‘re-armament’? Italy’s Giorgia Meloni rejected the term #ReArmEurope as too militaristic. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez agreed. ‘I don’t like the term rearm,’ he said. ‘I think the EU is a political project of soft power … This is my principled objection to the term of rearm.’
Not unreasonably, Sánchez also pointed out that his voters were not expecting Russian troops to be crossing the Pyrenees any time soon. And perhaps less reasonably, he argued that climate change should also be counted as a ‘strategic security threat’ to the continent as grave of that of Russia. Europe’s grand defence project has accordingly been re-christened ‘Readiness 2030’.
As has become traditional, the most vocal voices for major re-armament came from Baltic countries who feel most vulnerable to future Russian attack but are too small to make a significant contribution to paying the bill. Ukraine must be ‘militarised to the teeth’ to deter Moscow, argued Finnish President Alexander Stubb. Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, warned that the EU should prepare for the worst. ‘We don’t have a cold war, but we have a hot war on European soil, and the threat is existential,’ Kallas told reporters. ‘It’s as real as it can get.’
Just how real the threat of the Kremlin actually attacking NATO, with its nuclear umbrella and Article 5 security guarantees, is debatable. What is not in doubt is the urgency of Ukraine’s ongoing land and air war against Russia. Volodymyr Zelensky urged immediate action, warning Ukraine needs shells ‘as soon as possible.’
Instead of action in the form of shells and cash, Zelensky got declarations of solidarity and rousing statements. Macron announced that next week members of Europe’s ‘coalition of the willing’ – which does not include Poland, Germany, Finland, France or Italy – will meet Zelensky to discuss details of a potential European peacekeeping force. But as the Kremlin has already emphatically rejected the idea of Nato boots on the ground and the White House has refused to ‘back-stop’ such a force with its air power, the idea is already dead in the water.
Since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, the EU and its member states have dispatched €50 billion in military support to Ukraine, comparable to the US’s contribution of $66.5 billion. Europe has also imposed more than 600 different sanctions on Russia, which leaders promised to beef up. But even as they promise more sanctions, European countries continue to pay Russia far more for continued (and indeed growing) imports of oil and gas than they are giving to Ukraine. Russia is Europe’s second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas, with imports rising 25 per cent over 2024.
Also lost in the big talk of re-armament was the announcement that Europe has abandoned plans to confiscate frozen Russian assets. According to transcripts obtained by Deutsche Welle, EU leaders agreed that the Kremlin assets, worth more than €200 billion, must ‘stay frozen’ until Russia ends the war and pays Ukraine damages. And Hungary’s Viktor Orbán also repeated his long-standing objection to continued sanctions on Russia, raising the possibility that he will actually use his power of veto when the sanctions come up for renewal in July.
Overpromising and underdelivering has become something of an EU speciality. And the grand talk and posturing about stepping up to replace an absent US is, in practical terms, floundering on a lack of actual available money. For all the sloganeering, it’s Europe rather than the US that is, in real terms, Awol from this battle.
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Written by Owen Matthews
Owen Matthews writes about Russia for The Spectator and is the author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine.
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