When Gabrielius Landsbergis was asked about the grenades on Monday morning, he let out a deep sigh. The Lithuanian Foreign Minister doesn’t even try to hide his frustration: The EU wanted to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine within a year, as the Europeans promised in March. But now, four months before the deadline, the results are poor.
According to diplomats, a maximum of 320,000 missiles have so far been sent to Ukraine through the EU program. The majority of these were not heavy 155-millimeter grenades, which the country urgently needs, but smaller mortar shells. “This is a very unpleasant thing,” said Landsbergis on Monday in Brussels before meeting with his European colleagues. Another diplomat expressed himself less cautiously: “This is doing enormous damage to the credibility of the EU,” he says. “If we promise something, then we should do it.”
“We are surprised,” says a government official
The anger contained in these sentences extends far beyond artillery ammunition. The Eastern European EU countries in particular are currently concerned that Europe’s solidarity with Ukraine is beginning to fundamentally shake after almost two years of war and in view of the exploding violence between Israel and the Palestinians. “We are surprised,” says a government representative, “that we sometimes have to explain the most banal things that are at stake in this war – namely, that the protection of territorial integrity is an essential pillar of the European peace order.”
One of the few foreign ministers who does not primarily talk about Gaza when they arrive in Brussels on Monday morning: Gabrielius Landsbergis from Lithuania.
(Photo: Virginia Mayo/AP)
It was clear at the foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday that the EU governments are distracted at the moment and are looking more at the Middle East than at Ukraine. Landsbergis is one of the few ministers who does not primarily talk about Gaza when they arrive. His German colleague Annalena Baerbock assures that Russian warlord Vladimir Putin is “exciting too soon” when he speculates that European aid to Kiev will decrease. But she also talks primarily about the dramatic situation of Palestinian civilians.
In fact, not only since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel at the beginning of October has the EU found it increasingly difficult to follow through on its promise to support Ukraine “for as long as necessary”. This can be observed primarily in money. Several aid projects that add up to more than 75 billion euros are stuck in the Brussels wheels, some for months. The largest chunk is 50 billion euros that the EU Commission wants to spend over the next four years to support Ukraine’s state budget so that the country does not go bankrupt. Brussels diplomats expect that the money will ultimately be approved by the member states. But an agreement is still pending.
A diplomat says the EU has a “feeling of fatigue”
Another, separate aid package worth 20 billion euros, which EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell had proposed to finance European arms purchases for Kiev over the next four years, is seen as having no chance in Brussels. Large member states like Germany, which provide Ukraine with billions of euros in bilateral arms aid, do not want to have to also pay into an EU pot. The friendly wording is that there is “room for improvement” in Borrell’s proposal. In plain language: The plan is as good as dead.
Even a comparatively small sum, such as the 500 million euros that Brussels has been wanting to be released by the 27 EU governments for weeks to compensate those European countries that have supplied arms and ammunition to Ukraine, is currently on hold. Hungary is blocking the money – no one in Brussels really knows why. Initially, Budapest was angry because a Hungarian bank had ended up on a Ukrainian list of Western companies that still do business with Russia. Kiev has since axed the bank, but Budapest still remains tough. “This is very annoying,” says a diplomat. “I’ve stopped wondering what Hungary is doing.”
Given the “feeling of tiredness” that one diplomat attests to the EU, it is hardly surprising that other important projects intended to help Ukraine are also not making progress in Europe. This applies to the twelfth package of Russia sanctions as well as to a legally watertight plan for how the Moscow Central Bank’s assets frozen in the EU could be used to rebuild Ukraine. In both cases, the EU authorities and the member states have been struggling for months without finding a common line.
This standstill in the EU, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Landsbergis warned on Monday, only helps the aggressor Russia: “Putin is preparing to blow the dust off his victory plans, which he had to put on the shelf last year.”