The war in Ukraine is still ongoing. On the frontlines, in Ukraine’s East and South, soldiers are still being killed. In the cities, civilians are still being bombed. In the occupied territories, innocents are still being tortured and murdered.
The need for Europe to support Ukraine has only grown.
Over the coming months, that support will be front and centre. On EU membership, on economic support and on ammunition, we are reaching essential decision points. Sadly, a lack of strategic foresight by Europe’s leaders means that these are all likely to fall short.
Take EU membership. In just under two weeks, the leaders of each EU country will be meeting for one of their regular summits where they set the political direction of the EU on the key issues of the day. Having approved Ukraine’s initial application for membership, the next threshold to cross is to grant the European Commission the mandate to open negotiations with Ukraine. It is in this phase that the nitty-gritty of becoming an EU member really takes place, as the Commission identifies the gaps, sets the objectives and tracks the aspirant’s progress in aligning with the current laws and standards for EU members.
For its part, the Commission has already recommended going ahead with this step. Indeed, a large majority of EU countries probably support the idea. However, Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has become increasingly vocal in his opinion that talks should not be opened.
Superficially this is dressed up in concerns about the minority rights of Hungarians in Ukraine. Quite aside from the fact that the members of this community have little love for Orbán and would happily defend Kyiv, Ukraine has also been exceptionally cooperative on this issue, presenting plans for more Hungarian-language education and linguistic freedom for these people.
The truth is that Orbán is acting as Moscow’s man in Brussels and wants to curry favour with Russia by advancing its interests. In this instance he would do so by casting the crucial dissenting vote in a decision that requires unanimity among all the EU leaders.
Yet the distortive effects of the unanimity requirement should not lead people to mistake Hungary’s true power here. It is a small country with a developing economy, heavily reliant on EU subsidies and American defence. Orbán is no titan, no great leader of men. His power is built on an elite circle of oligarchs whose allegiance to him lasts as long as the next cheque. His populist, election-dominating mystique is the shoddy product of a captured media and judiciary. If the EU’s other leaders decided that Ukraine’s accession mattered to them, they could pressure Orbán into giving way, either with sticks or with carrots.
More than Orbán’s predictable stunts, it is the lack of preparation that is concerning. Nominally pro-Ukraine governments know what Orbán will say, yet they seem to have no plan to shut it down or to find a compromise. Neither willing to bear the (minor) economic costs of punishing Hungary’s government nor the moral costs of offering a trade, Kyiv’s allies seem set on shrugging their shoulders in the face of Russian sabotage. Beneath the surface, some may even be glad that Ukraine’s EU membership is being put on indefinite hold.
This is not good enough. To believe that the question of Ukraine’s place in the EU will simply disappear is naïve in the extreme. If not resolved this month, the debate will keep on surfacing again and again. Regardless of which route they take, the pro-Ukraine leaders must be willing to act in order to secure the next step of Ukraine’s European path.
Meanwhile, economic support is also struggling. As the war has dragged on, Europe has steadily overtaken the US to become the most important economic backer for Ukraine. At this stage, Kyiv is heavily dependent on transfers from European countries (mostly grouped together via the EU) in order to have any kind of state budget and to prevent a further collapse in public services. Part of the next EU leader’s summit is dedicated to agreeing to an additional €50bn, spread over four years (enough to cover a significant part of Ukraine’s annual budgets in this time).
As with EU membership, here too Orbán is threatening to play the spoiler. He is also joined by Slovakia’s Robert Fico, another pro-Russia populist trying to water down help for Ukraine.
However, this is much the same debate and the same conclusions as with EU membership: those who are serious about pushing back on Russia’s aggression must be willing to push back against Putin’s pawns inside of Europe.
The real scandal in Europe’s economic relations with Ukraine is not in Brussels meeting rooms but on Ukraine’s border.
Earlier in the year, exports of Ukrainian grain were unilaterally blocked by Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Not only did this violate EU law (trade policy is an EU competency), it also struck at a critical source of income for Ukraine at a time when Russia has occupied key port cities and strangled the Black Sea shipping route. While it could be expected of Hungary and arguably Slovakia, it was a terribly misguided and short-sighted decision by the Polish government, who had previously made much of their anti-Russian convictions, taking the moral high ground in contrast to governments in Western Europe. Instead of standing by those principles, they rapidly caved when farmers complained that Ukrainian grain was too cheap.
The shame of this action has now been deepened by the latest act of economic warfare against Ukraine: a blockade of the border points by truckers in Slovakia and Poland. Many hundreds of trucks are unable to get out of Ukraine as the protesters in the neighbouring states once again complain about being undercut. That their Ukrainian counterparts must do the same work while living under the threat of Russian missiles garners no sympathy.
So why are Warsaw and Bratislava standing by while these thoughtless protesters enforce their own sanctions on Ukraine? It’s tempting to say that governments have their hands tied as they are obliged to follow the desires of their voters, but this is a weak excuse. In reality it is not mass public opinion but influential and forceful special interests that are driving decisions here, all while undermining the broader strategic position of both Ukraine and the EU.
Instead of sitting on their hands, these governments need to be more forceful, breaking up the protests if necessary. Just as Western European leaders had to break domestic taboos in order to do the right thing on Ukraine, so must those in Eastern Europe.
Finally, ammunition. There’s no getting round it, Ukraine is running out and the supplies are not developing anywhere near fast enough. While Russia has potentially received up to a million artillery shells from North Korea, deliveries from Europe to Ukraine only amount to a few hundred thousand.
The problem is known and the solution is too. Europe’s defence industry isn’t big enough to sustain the necessary production and they won’t expand without longer-term contracts. Without that certainty, businesses in the sector fear that they’d simply be overextending now, before being hung out to dry in a few years’ time.
But a number of governments seem slow to come round to this reality, with little evidence that the necessary contracts are coming through. These countries are adopting a wait-and-see approach, holding out in the hope that this issue might work itself out, perhaps betting on the efforts of others to relieve them of any significant obligations.
Meanwhile others are still not realistic about what the EU’s defence industry is capable of in the short term. France has insisted that EU money should only be used to get supplies from companies in the EU. This is now creating an unnecessary constraint on the EU’s real ability to procure ammunition as there simply isn’t the production capacity to meet Ukraine’s needs. This rule must be dropped until the industry has had time to expand. For now, EU countries need to get into the mindset they had during the energy crisis, when every supply source was a good source.
With ammunition deliveries falling far short of what is needed, governments must be both more proactive and more flexible.
This time next year, America may be gearing up to hand over power to a man who has no care for Ukraine and is a friend to autocrats around the world. If Europe is to avoid a geopolitical disaster on its borders, one whose negative consequences would endure for decades, then it must step up now and act to help Ukraine.