But the end of U.S. military support leaves a gaping hole in allies’ ability to support Ukraine in all aspects of its war, most notably when it comes to intelligence and targeting information for precision weaponry.
“The end of intelligence sharing is very significant indeed for Ukraine,” Colonel Philip Ingram, a former British army intelligence officer told POLITICO. “It means losing access to target acquisition information for long-range missiles, but also intercepting incoming rockets and drone fleets. EU member states just simply don’t have much of a strategic intelligence capability because they’re so internally focused — countries like Germany just depend entirely on NATO. They now face the prospect of having to step up, but it takes decades and hundreds of millions of dollars.”
As European leaders sat down for dinner, a report by NBC News citing current and former U.S. officials raised fresh doubts about U.S. commitments to NATO, suggesting that Washington may only commit to defending countries that commit a certain percentage of their gross domestic product to defense.
Concern about a potential U.S. withdrawal or downgrade in Europe’s security architecture has set off one of the biggest geopolitical crises to hit the continent in decades, with leaders engaging in a frenzy of diplomacy over the past two weeks.
When all was said and done in Brussels, the Europeans’ scramble to avoid losing the U.S. security guarantee proved to be their overriding priority. Helping to strengthen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, and at the negotiating table, ended up being a distant second-order concern — as demonstrated by the amount of time they spent talking about Ukraine versus defense.
The defense discussion lasted for most of the 10 hours, with leaders locking horns over how to finance an €800 billion defense rampup and how much of their investment to spend on European versus non-EU sources.
Talks on Ukraine, however, were done and dusted in about 15 minutes, according to one EU diplomat. That said it all.
Jacopo Barigazzi, Gabriel Gavin, Elisa Braun, Rasmus Buchsteiner and Lucia Mackenzie contributed reporting.
