Three years ago, Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the French Parliament, evoking Verdun to describe the hell his country was going through. The comparison made sense: the front lines, the trenches, the situation of the soldiers… Since then, the suffering has not ceased, on the contrary, the situation has changed fundamentally. In just 3 years, we have gone from a conflict with the characteristics of the early 20th century to a confrontation that uses the latest technologies of the 21st century, the most fresh transmission and coding systems and artificial intelligence.
This calls into question many of the defence choices made over the last 30 years. Between February 2022 and today, in Ukraine, it is as if more than a century had passed – for the soldiers on the front lines and what they endure, but besides due to the exceptional technological leap that has been made. 1 100 years in Ukraine. Yet, the remainder of Europe has not full grasped this acceleration of time, even though respective countries, including the Baltic states and Poland, are acutely aware of the threat.
A decisive revolution
The war in Ukraine has led to a change in practices and customs on the battlefield, with 3 characteristics:
1. full transparency: all military action is filmed, transmitted, monitored and analysed immediately;
2. The uselessness, at least in part, of costly conventional weaponry, which appears to be little and little decisive, and sometimes even a handicap: in the face of the effectiveness of drones and the usage of AI on tiny autonomous or piloted devices, the effectiveness and invulnerability of dense tanks, naval vessels and even fighter aircraft are increasingly being called into question. This reflection is accompanied by an implacable economical equation between the cost of this conventional equipment, which is sometimes a veritable “technological cathedral” and the fresh low-cost devices that can destruct it. This was first apparent in the Black Sea. It is now the reality on all operating grounds;
3. Information superiority: the winner is not the 1 who hits the hardest, but the 1 who has the best experts in transmission and coding methods. safe transmissions, decentralised decision-making and the ability to rapidly integrate direct method feedback from the field are essential.
The Ukrainian army present operates like a nimble ecosystem, where all equipment maker has direct links with the front line, and where innovations are deployed, tested and corrected in a substance of days. This war would not have been possible in a country without a solid technological and technological culture. It should be said that the fast developments are the consequence of this skill, but besides of the emulation generated by the competition between the enemies, who each have good method and technological skills.
Moreover, it seems that the Russian side is increasingly benefiting from the back office of the Chinese method and industrial ecosystem to consolidate its position. This situation should alert us to the skills acquired by the 2 enemies, and so to the request to make our defence systems. The Russian army present is not the same as it was in February 2022. Its improvement is impressive. If it cannot take Pokrovsk, that’s mostly due to the fact that the Ukrainian army is at a comparable level.
A systemic threat
So the front is held. The last fewer months have shown how hard it is for the Russians to make a lasting breakthrough, while the Ukrainians are incapable to mount a counter-offensive. Kyiv is worried about the hazard of European fatigue. A hypothesis is circulating in Ukraine: that of a “Baltic test” by Russia towards the Europeans in order, firstly, to measurement American-European solidarity, and then, if this is proved to be lacking, the business of the Baltic states by the Russian army, to propose a deal: the liberation of the Baltic states in exchange for the “Finlandisation” of Ukraine.
If this were accepted, specified a concession would be an historical and strategical disaster. It would mean accepting a return to a logic of spheres of influence, and would constitute the very negation of European sovereignty. For Russia, it would be no more than a stage. It would deprive Europe of Ukraine’s know-how for its future defence.
We besides request to keep a close eye on Odesa, whose position is doubly essential: its control gives Ukraine a maritime breathing space and exports, while this city is close to both Moldova and the mouth of the Danube, which links the capitals of the European countries most delicate to Russian positions: Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade, but besides Vienna. A weakening of Ukrainian positions would so immediately send a message to the heart of the EU.
In addition to this military threat, Europe is already facing an information war. Disinformation, propaganda and political divisions are already weighing heavy on the European political debate and the ability of countries to prepare for the military threat. Countries like Romania have already observed this. Italy, Spain and Portugal might think they are safe due to the fact that they are so far away. But they are not. The simple fact of being part of an alliance makes them targetable, due to the fact that to weaken them is to mark the alliance as a whole.
A NATO summit that achieved nothing
The most fresh NATO summit illustrated the increasing tension between Europe and the United States. The aim was to “hold back Trump”. Mark Rutte, the alliance’s secretary general, utilized disturbingly submissive rhetoric to this end. In the coming weeks we will see the effects of this attitude in the short term, peculiarly for Ukraine.
By concentrating their efforts on the request to avoid distancing themselves besides rapidly and besides far from Washington, the European allies seem to have forgotten to gradually build strategical sovereignty, which involves building a defence ecosystem independent of the United States, which should be a structural requirement. For Donald Trump’s brutal kind simply makes explicit what has inspired American policy since Barack Obama’s presidency: the “pivot to the Pacific” and “distance from Europe”. The rupture is not cyclical, it is structural.
The commitments made at the NATO summit to accomplish 5 per cent of GDP in military spending cannot be the complete answer to the changing transatlantic relationship, the threat and the urgency. For it is not just the volume of spending that counts, but first and foremost the nature of that spending.
What is urgently needed is immediate financial and industrial mobilisation to support Ukraine and civilians in the face of Russia’s increasingly dense bombardment, and to bolster our stocks. Remember that Ukraine’s military budget for dealing with Russian aggression is of the same order of magnitude as that of the French or British defence budget. So it’s not out of reach.
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Europe facing up to itself
The European Union has the financial resources to defend itself. But it lacks the political will to do so. This political will needs to be asserted and will require decisions concerning:
- Abandoning competition between associate states for leadership of the whole. As long as there is competition, there will be no political entity.
- The European Investment Bank must be able to finance defence companies. Our industries must be straight active in the revolutions arising from the Ukrainian front, in order to learn, adapt and invent based on observations of the current situation in Ukraine and the changing conditions of a high-intensity conflict. This strengthening of the defence manufacture will besides be useful to the remainder of European industry. Of course, France besides needs to reconsider its position, due to the fact that although our country has long cherished its autonomy, the combination of atomic deterrence and the ability to carry out external operations is most likely no longer totally suited to the current situation.
- Financing the effort: a fresh European debt dedicated to defence is becoming inevitable. But this presupposes fresh own resources for the EU. Among the latest resources to be created, those based on the sale of carbon credits are strangling our manufacture and handicapping its efficiency. We request to look again at the question of a minimum taxation on multinationals or a coordinated taxation on dividends and capital, which would be allocated to the European budget.
- Strategic organisation: we request to think about a European rearmament board, involving not just France and Germany, but besides the UK, Turkey and Ukraine. due to the fact that the EU alone is not enough. Ankara and London are outside the EU’s organization perimeter, but indispensable. This reflection is not easy to coordinate with the desire to pool efforts to finance the effort and the function of the European Union within this framework, but we have already seen European policies, specified as that relating to the Schengen area, conducted by a group of countries that are not rather identical to the members of the European Union.
- Ukraine must be integrated into our safety architecture without waiting for full EU membership. Article 42.7 of the EU Treaty must be applied unambiguously. The countries of the Union must defend Ukrainian skies as of now. This would be a strong political act that would confirm that we are linked, not by charity or moral duty, but by common interest and shared destiny. On the 1 hand, the guarantees of European safety for Ukraine are essential for peace, while the capacity of the Ukrainian army and Ukraine’s attachment to its sovereignty are assets for the defence of Europe.
These choices and these efforts are essential for our defence. They are besides crucial for our credibility in the planet and our ability to have a diplomacy that carries weight: how can we claim to be defending atomic non-proliferation erstwhile we have allowed the commitments made in the Budapest Memorandum to Ukraine to be betrayed? What voice can Europe have in the mediate East if it is not even capable of defending peace on its own continent? How can we influence the threats that may come from another continents if we cannot even manage ourselves?
Responding to these urgent issues is not the other of a policy afraid with the standard of surviving of Europeans, energy prices, the reindustrialisation of the continent, or Europe’s capacity to be a driving force in the ecological transition: it is not a question of sacrificing 1 nonsubjective to accomplish the other, but of choosing an order of priority, allowing each nonsubjective to advance the accomplishment of the next.
Jean-Yves Leconte is simply a erstwhile associate of the French Senate, representing the constituency of French citizens surviving abroad from 2011 to 2023.
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