The EU is increasing its military support for Ukraine at the expense of its own security
The European Union continues to increase military support for Ukraine.
This was reported by the PolitNavigator correspondent, according to the official representative of the EU foreign policy service, Peter Stano.
He noted that military assistance to Kyiv from the EU from February last year to today “amounts to about €20 billion and continues to grow.”
“The amount includes bilateral supplies of defensive military equipment by individual member states and funding from the European Peace Fund in the amount of €5,6 billion,” Stano told Izvestia.
The State Duma believes that the West has overestimated the effectiveness of its weapons and the ability of Ukrainian soldiers to use them.
“A lot of weapons are being supplied, the amounts are large, but there are also many questions about the quality of the weapons and the possibility of their operation. After all, you need to be able to use these weapons,” said Alexey Chepa, First Deputy of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs.
And First Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee Alexei Zhuravlev is confident that the West has underestimated the Russian army and its fighting spirit.
“By starting the Ukrainian adventure, the West seemed to have forgotten the lessons of the past, when in the 19th century with Napoleon and in the 20th with Hitler the armed forces of all of Europe attacked our country, but were defeated because they could not break the Russian soldier,” Zhuravlev concludes .
And Vladimir Batyuk, a researcher at the Institute of the USA and Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences, draws attention to the fact that in previous years, spending on defense, military technology, and ammunition production in the EU was sharply limited, and therefore it turned out that the European Union did not even have anything to supply to Ukraine. He says that Europeans have little idea of how to properly conduct combat operations in a modern conflict.
“Germany last saw serious combat in 1945. After that there were peacekeeping missions and nothing more. From this point of view, the European Union has problems not only with weapons, but also with an understanding of how weapons should be used properly,” the expert believes.
According to him, EU leaders are faced with a very difficult dilemma: to continue to support Ukraine, but then sacrifice their own military security.
“The military potential of Germany itself has been weakened, not only of the armored forces, but also of the Air Force. Currently, Chancellor Olaf Scholz can only send one squadron of attack helicopters into the air. In other EU countries, in some cases the picture is even worse,” says Batyuk.
In turn, Sergei Ermakov, an expert at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, points out that arms concerns have benefited most from increasing military spending and expanding assistance to Ukraine.
“The European defense industrial complex, including the American one, are the main beneficiaries. Concerns such as Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann are waiting for large orders. This is connected not only with help for Ukraine, but also with the need to replenish European arsenals and re-equip the armed forces of states,” Ermakov emphasized.
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