The Russian challenge changes the European paradigm and promotes common defense

The Kremlin tanks that, two years ago, took up positions on the border of Russia and Belarus with Ukraine not only invaded the neighboring country in a few hours, but also destroyed in one fell swoop the security order built since the end of the cold War. The world suddenly woke up to a new geopolitical reality that is especially disturbing for the European continent.

Jean Monnet said that Europe is growing due to crisis, and Vladimir Putin agreed with him on the fateful morning of February 24, 2022, but there is no precedent for the speed, determination and ambition with which the Union reacted to the brutal violation. of the Ukrainian borders in those first hours and months in the political, economic, energy and military fields, assuming greater effects for its own economy: unprecedented sanctions, massive reception of refugees, renunciation of cheap Russian gas, shipment of weapons to Kyiv at a charge to the European budget, recognition of Ukraine and Moldova as candidate countries…

Faced with a brutal paradigm shift, two years after the invasion, the EU is preparing to take a new leap forward in its integration in the field of defense, one of the competencies most jealously guarded by national governments. The instruments put in place temporarily to help Ukraine are not enough to confront the “deterioration of the large-scale geopolitical climate that we face”, maintains the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Industry, Thierry Breton. “The time has come to move from emergency responses to building the EU’s long-term response capacity,” not only because of the imperative of war in Ukraine, but also because its member states must “prepare to confront the worst scenarios and adopt a more assertive and dissuasive position.”

The nature of the threats and the speed at which the global technological race advances mean that “no Member State can advance alone in this field, and the EU cannot allow itself to be left behind,” the French commissioner, a supporter, defends in statements to La Vanguardia. that the European Investment Bank “invests more decisively in defense-related activities, and not only in dual-use technologies.” Breton has been working for months on the proposal that the European Commission will approve on March 5, a European strategy for the defense industry that will give continuity to the ad hoc instruments created in these two years with a view to their expansion during the next mandate. From this initiative come the recent statements in Munich, with a slight electoral flavor, by its president, Ursula von der Leyen, that it is time for the EU to “spend more, spend better and spend European [money]” on defense.

For two years, European governments have emptied a large part of their arsenals to help Kyiv and signed new contracts with industry to send it material, but right now the situation on the front is critical due to a lack of ammunition. “Ukraine is paying dearly for the lazy thirty,” says French defense analyst François Heisbourg, alluding to the three decades of relaxation in terms of security that Europe, above all, took after the Cold War, in contrast to the so-called thirty glorious ones that followed the Second World War. But Europe and the world, he says, could pay even more for letting Kyiv fall, he maintains. Vladimir Putin has not renounced the objectives set out in the ultimatum issued to NATO before attacking Ukraine, which involved abandoning the eleven countries that joined after 1991 to their fate and not accepting new partners. “If, despite all the Western support, Russia wins in Ukraine, it will undoubtedly return to take revenge in two or three years, once the wounds of the war have healed,” says Heisbourg, who evokes the “friendship without limits” proclaimed by Russia and China as a factor that would give a global dimension to their actions.

The atmosphere in Brussels and the European chancelleries is serious today. Although the unit of the Twenty-Seven has survived better than many expected, the war in Ukraine is increasingly a European war. With Joe Biden in the White House, but blocked by the maneuvers of Donald Trump, who is advancing positions to be nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, the feeling of progressive American abandonment is advancing and could become a reality if the New Yorker, who no longer hides his alignment with the interests of Putin’s Russia, he is re-elected.

While the EU has just approved a macro-financial aid program of 50 billion euros over four years for Kyiv, the United States has still not moved forward with its new military aid package to Ukraine, which has not received donations from Washington since October. The level of support provided so far from both sides of the Atlantic is in fact equal, with more emphasis on the military field on the American side and more on the economic and humanitarian field in the case of the EU. Europe has also been ahead of the US in weighing the risks of escalation with Russia and deciding to send new types of military capabilities to Kyiv.

As the conflict drags on, European unrest increases, notes Pierre Vimont, former French ambassador to the EU and the United States. “This concern is not only or primarily linked to the uncertainty that prevails on the battlefield,” the diplomat wrote a few months ago in Le Grand Continent, before the worsening of Ukrainian military shortcomings, but “it is rooted in a more “It is profound that Europe has reached a turning point in its long history.” European leaders have understood “that their old conception of EU policies and governance must evolve”, that the ideological battles of the past “must give way to a new geopolitical dimension in Europe that requires an economic boost, an increase in its military power and diplomatic agility,” he maintains.

Vimont prefers to put the emphasis on this underlying current rather than on the daily difficulties that arise with each initiative that is launched, for example, the discussions about what is more important: whether to only co-finance the purchases of weapons and ammunition from Ukraine if they have bought in Europe, as France defends, or reimburse them wherever they come from. Or the blocking of the reform of the European Peace Facility, used to finance the shipment of weapons to Ukraine, because Germany wants the bilateral contributions of each country to be taken into account when distributing costs.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the EU, Vsevolod Chentsov, also tries to be optimistic about European support, but without hiding the fact that everything could fall apart if the Union loses sight of the fact that Russia is “a criminal regime.” “In the last two years we have managed to create a solid cooperation framework with the EU and the member states with which we work in different dimensions. To maintain that cooperation, we must ensure that the type of threat that Russia poses is correctly understood and develop a strategy to confront it systemically,” he told a small group of journalists the day before yesterday. “It is not enough to give us ammunition and weapons to exhaust Russia. Ukraine is also exhausted. It is about having a serious and solid strategy to help us win in every way.”