A. Kubilius. Continued financial and military support to Ukraine by EU Member States

2024-09-23 | European Parliament, Ukraine

Mr President, dear colleagues, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has stressed not once that one of the most important priorities for new Commission will be defence and security of Europe, which is directly related to security of Ukraine.

I quote Commission President: ‘The best investment in European security is investing in the security of Ukraine.’

The first question is: are we investing enough in Ukraine security? My answer is very simple: we are investing a lot, but not enough.

Last year, all the Western military support to Ukraine reached only EUR 40 billion, when Russians spent for the war more than 120 billion. Even if we would be ready to spend not 40 billion, but 100 billion, we would have a problem to supply large amounts of weapons because capacities of our military industries are very low for the time being.

Even if we are giving weapons to Ukraine, we are – at least some of our countries – introducing red lines of restrictions not to use them against targets in Russian territory.

All those three reasons show very clearly we are not investing in the security of Ukraine and in our security enough. How to change the situation: we need immediately to find much larger financial resources for military assistance to Ukraine. And we can do it. We need to radically ramp up production of our military industry and to integrate Ukrainian military industry with European one. And we need to remove any red lines in defence of Ukraine security, which means in defence of our security.