Europe must keep Ukraine armed until 2027
Even Donald Trump now concedes that the Ukrainians are taking a battering. On a single recent weekend some 500 drones and 60 missiles rained down on population centres in western Ukraine. Soon after a conversation with Trump, Vladimir Putin launched a further seven-hour bombardment of Kyiv. Russia’s enlarged missile plants are under orders to supply enough missiles and drones to launch even more ferocious attacks to flatten towns well behind the frontline.
The aim: destroy national morale and send the message to the Ukrainians that they are naked without western air defence systems. The West, in other words, is complicit in their annihilation.
Until he realised he was being duped by the Kremlin, Trump seemed to be playing his own double game, promising to make air defence available to Ukraine while actually pausing deliveries. The White House said this was out of concern about US military readiness and the depletion of stocks; in fact congressional funding replaces what is sent to Ukraine with newer munitions for the US military. Helping Ukraine’s defence was constructed as a way of modernising American defence and keeping the arms industry humming.
Now Trump, this time following a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, appears to have relented, though no one knows for how long the drip-feeding approach will last. Trump is still counting on Ukrainian exhaustion (which happens to be Putin’s crude tactic as well), the long grinding road to a capitulation in Kyiv that can be dressed up as peace for the Nobel judges.
My bet though is on the terms of the war shifting, driven by rapid advances in military technology, by intelligence-driven surprise attacks and by a transfer of Ukrainian patronage from the US to a European “coalition of the willing”. These factors suggest to me the war could continue this summer and next, and only reach settlement in 2027.
Almost all of Europe’s fresh commitments to greater defence spending and more effective armies take shape in 2027 at the earliest. The fixes for fragmented defence industries, for their low output, the limits on competition and home country bias are not going to be implemented quickly. Europe supplies 12 confusingly different main battle tanks to Ukraine; America supplies one. Refitting the Abrams in Ohio – putting on new modern turrets and hulls – can take two years per tank.
So if, as widely advertised by the White House and the Pentagon, the focus of US defence will slide towards Asia and the possible Chinese blockade of Taiwan in 2027, America’s European allies have to be ready to pick up the slack in Ukraine. And prepare for it now.
That will be the leitmotif of the “coalition of the willing” meeting tomorrow. Their only hope of retaining credibility in this task is that the integration of artificial intelligence into new weapons systems is advancing fast.
It is being road tested in Ukraine by a western-trained army that is adapting its war fighting by the day. It has learnt to scale up its production: artillery shell production was 50,000 in 2022, last year it reached 2.4 million. It has started to build its own howitzers; some small arms are produced by 3D printing.
Above all it is mastering the first major drone war. At sea, naval drones take out Russian warships; Russian tank assaults are blunted by drones with big payloads. The Rusi think tank recently estimated that drones are now responsible for up to 70 per cent of the damage inflicted on Russian installations. Russian snipers who used to hide for days under camouflage netting picking off Ukrainians are now spotted by thermally sensitive drones that relay the co-ordinates back within seconds. The result: snipers now have to operate in groups of three and move their position fast. The snag: Ukrainian snipers are becoming vulnerable to Russian tech.
The implications for Trump’s European allies are clear. They have to create between now and 2027 an alternative support structure for Ukraine lest Trump prove himself an unreliable guardian.
We should help to develop (and learn from) the fleet-footed Ukrainian arms industry. The French government has asked Renault to make drones for Ukraine; Germany’s Rheinmetall is building an ammunition plant in Ukraine that should be in production early next year. Forty foreign arms companies already operate in Ukraine, encouraged by the privatisation of the country’s defence sector.
The Ukrainian survival mission needs our support for another 18 months; that’s the time needed to establish Ukraine’s technical edge over Russian manpower-heavy assaults. Putin’s night-time bombing raids over Ukrainian cities are clearly designed to sap the national will but they smack of desperation, too. There’s trouble in his military-industrial complex (mysterious suicides and accidents are the giveaway), the war economy is at capacity, growth is slowing, food inflation rising. It’s a society built on low expectations but long wars have a way of depressing them further.
Between now and 2027, Putin can be pushed into an even tighter corner by transferring a significant chunk of Russian funds frozen abroad to Ukraine for its urgent security and financial needs.
That’s taking time. Make it happen before 2027 and you will have Putin over a barrel: outwitted on the battlefield, facing a broken economy and a world thoroughly fed up with his military misadventures.
The Times
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