Europe deeply hollows out in defense – but little offers to strengthen the hand of Zelenskyy – Politico

But the end of American military support leaves a gaping hole in the ability of the Allies to support Ukraine in all aspects of its war, in particular with regard to intelligence and targeting information for precision weapons.

“The end of intelligence sharing is indeed very important for Ukraine,” Colonel Philip Ingram, a former intelligence officer for the British army, told Politico. “This means losing access to target acquisition information for long -range missiles, but also intercept incoming rockets and drone fleets. EU member states simply do not have much strategic intelligence capacity because they are so internally focused – countries like Germany depend completely on NATO. They are now faced with the prospect of having to intensify, but it takes decades and hundreds of millions of dollars. »»

While European leaders sat for dinner, an NBC News report citing current and old officials has raised new doubts about American commitments to NATO, suggesting that Washington cannot undertake to defend countries that commit a certain percentage of their gross domestic product in Defense.

The concerns about withdrawn or demograd from the United States potential in European security architecture have sparked one of the largest geopolitical crises to hit the continent for decades, leaders engaging in a frenzy of diplomacy in the past two weeks.

When everything was said and done in Brussels, the race for Europeans to avoid losing the American security guarantee has proven to be their priority priority. Helping to strengthen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, and at the negotiating table, ended up being a distant second -order concern – as shown by the time they spent talking about Ukraine against defense.

The defense discussion lasted most of the 10 hours, the leaders locking horns on how to finance a defense ramp of 800 billion euros and the quantity of their investment to spend for European sources and not.

Discussions on Ukraine, however, were made and dusted in about 15 minutes, according to an EU diplomat. That said everything.

Jacopo Barigazzi, Gabriel Gavin, Elisa Braun, Rasmus Buchsteiner and Lucia Mackenzie contributed to the reports.