Fighting Russia is now Europe's problem: America is about to leave the stage

Telegraph

9 hours ago

So it's official: Washington is pulling the plug on military aid to Ukraine. At Congressional hearings this week US secretary of defence Pete Hegseth confirmed the Trump administration has a 'very different view' of the war in Ukraine to that of Joe Biden's – and insisted that a 'negotiated peaceful settlement is in the best interest of both parties and our nation's interests.'
Given that the topic of the hearings was the US's 2026 military budget, the message could hardly have been clearer. Fighting Russia is now Europe's problem.
Washington has given Ukraine some $74 billion in military aid since Putin's invasion in February 2022. That includes game-changing equipment such as Patriot air defence systems that are Ukraine's only effective defence against Russian ballistic missiles, ATACMS and HIMARS missiles, long-range M777 artillery, tanks, armoured vehicles, and millions of artillery rounds.
Some of the Biden-era packages are still coming down the procurement pipeline. But the bitter bottom line for Kyiv is that it has been abandoned by its most powerful and deep-pocketed ally.
That leaves Ukraine three options. The first is to rely on Europe stepping in to supply the weapons and equipment it needs. The second – proposed earlier this month by Zelensky – was to buy US made weapons from Washington with European money. The third is to make the weapons it needs in Ukrainian factories, funded by money from European allies.
Happily for Ukraine, Europe's leaders have repeatedly promised to step up to the plate and deliver what Ukraine needs to fight on. Less happily, in practice, Europe seems better at promising than actually stepping.
Back on February 9, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a 'ReArm Europe' package in Brussels that 'could mobilise close to €800 billion of defence expenditures over five years … This is a moment for Europe, and we are ready to step up.'
But it soon emerged that this staggering sum was not, in fact, ready money but represented an easing of borrowing constraints on EU members if they chose to increase their defence budgets. On March 19 EU high representative for external relations, Kaja Kallas, proposed a €40 billion arms aid package for Ukraine. But that plan was shot down by doubters such as Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Spain and Italy. Last month Europe finally put some cash (albeit someone else's cash) on the table by directing €1 billion from the EU's Peace Facility – made from frozen Russian assets – towards financing Ukraine's domestic arms industry.
Kyiv will certainly put that aid to good use. Domestic production now meets up to 50 per cent of Ukraine's military needs, despite repeated Russian strikes on factories. And Ukraine already outproduces the EU in the production of many weapons.
Output of Ukraine's Bohdana howitzer is now 20 per month, outpacing the production of French Caesars, and could double with more EU funding. Drone production is scaling up fast, with five million small First Person View (FPV) drones planned for 2025, plus 30,000 long-range drones, and 3,000 cruise missiles.
Plus some of the new Ukrainian kit is actually better than foreign supplied equipment because it's tailored more precisely to the specific needs of the killing fields of Donbas. Ukraine's Limma Electronic warfare system outperforms Russian and Western tech in jamming Russian glide bombs.
And of course there's Ukraine's extraordinarily bold and sophisticated mass drone attack on Russian strategic bombers deep inside Siberia and the Arctic earlier this month, which featured drone swarms hidden in the roofs of prefabricated housing units and trucked right to their targets by unwitting freelance drivers.
So there's no doubt that Ukraine has the technical sophistication, the industrial capacity and the tactical imagination to create its own formidable defences. Indeed, by many metrics the Ukrainian army is not only the largest but also the best-equipped on the European continent, bar Russia's. But Ukraine also has deep vulnerabilities further down the defence-procurement totem pole when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts sinews of war, from artillery shells to bullets to spare parts.
And the most urgent military and political problem of all is a looming chronic shortage of bodies to man the front lines. Videos of violent press-gang tactics used to round up military-age men – often featuring posses of citizens rallying to save the men targeted – are the subject of daily online anger on Ukraine's social media.
Stories of Russia's imminent economic and military collapse make for feel-good reading – but aren't borne out by ongoing and relentless assaults in the air and on the ground. Russia is set to spend $160 billion on defence this year, and thanks to purchasing power disparities a dollar spent in Russia gets far more bang for the buck. A Russian T-90 costs approximately $4.5 million, a US M1 Abrams can cost as much as $9.61 million.
Western defence experts have warned that US-made Patriot missile systems, in production since 1981, are increasingly ineffective against Russian hypersonic cruise missiles and massed swarms of Iranian Shaheed drones.
Can Ukraine survive just on its own resources, and Europe's intermittent money? The deepest irony of all is that much of the Kremlin's lavish defence spending is directly financed by Europe itself, which is due to spend over €20 billion buying oil, gas, coal and uranium from Russia in 2025.