Summit showed Europe still doesn’t want to pay to save Ukraine

BRUSSELS — “We have a simple choice,” said Donald Tusk, Poland’s grim-faced prime minister, as he entered one of the most consequential European Union summits in a generation. “Either money today or blood tomorrow. And I am not talking about Ukraine only. I am talking about Europe.”

Tusk’s point was that Europeans’ own freedom is on the line in the muddy battlefields of Ukraine: EU countries can either pay to stop Vladimir Putin there now, or fight when his troops invade them next.

Tusk’s equation — cash or casualties — exposes the conflict at the heart of all the EU’s struggles over supporting Ukraine. What exactly are the bloc’s 27 members ultimately willing to contribute to save Ukraine, and themselves? 

Thursday night’s summit in Brussels offered an answer: ideally, someone else’s money.

At 2:56 a.m. on a rainy Brussels night, EU leaders reached a deal to borrow €90 billion on the financial markets to keep Ukraine afloat for the next two years. “We committed, we delivered,” boasted the President of the European Council António Costa.

Beyond the spin, the pattern is clear. A divided bloc of European states argued for months in public and private over who should pay the bill, and it’s probably not settled yet.

Europe has relied on American military muscle for its defenses since World War II. It counted on American money for Ukraine’s defenses for three years since February 2022. After Donald Trump returned to the White House and ended U.S. funding this year, Europeans increased their contributions — but not by enough to fill the gap. 

So the EU’s power players had to find another source to raise the money for Ukraine. 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen knew how they wanted to get the cash — by raiding Russian assets lodged in a Belgian bank. They spent the past two months trying to persuade fellow leaders to come on board with their plan to use Moscow’s frozen funds for a vast loan for Ukraine. 

But Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever refused, fearing legal action and other reprisals from Putin if the sovereign assets were repurposed to help Kyiv. 

Instead, a plan B, first reported by POLITICO last month, was quietly being drafted. When De Wever again rejected the assets idea, Merz backed down and the backup option to use joint EU borrowing gained last-minute support around the summit table. 

Under this plan, the EU’s joint borrowing will be guaranteed by the EU budget, which is funded by member countries. Eventually, the Russian assets could be used to repay that loan, though it’s not yet clear.

There is no question that Kyiv needs the cash. According to the International Monetary Fund, Ukraine was facing a funding shortfall of €72 billion next year.

“There is no more important act of European defense than supporting Ukraine’s defense,” von der Leyen said on the eve of the summit.

Unfortunately for the Commission president and others who want to do their best for Ukraine, many Europeans still don’t buy her argument. 

The Kiel Institute has been tracking support for Ukraine since the start of Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Its latest update reveals the holes that European nations are leaving in Kyiv’s finances.

In a report earlier this month, Kiel analysts said new aid allocations in 2025 might drop to their lowest level since the outbreak of the war in 2022, and were on track to fall far short of what is needed to plug the gap left by America’s withdrawal. 

At the same time, the split in contributions between European countries widened. While France and Germany and the U.K. significantly boosted their contributions to Ukraine, Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark remained far ahead in terms of the percentages of GDP they spend. 

Italy and Spain, however, “contributed very little,” the Kiel Institute said. That same dynamic was on display in the run-up to the summit. Southern EU countries joined Belgium in opposing the reparations loan plan, while Germany and the Nordics pushed hard for it to go through. 

Under the terms of the final summit deal, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia won’t contribute to the funding plan to Ukraine at all. An EU of 27 member states turned into a gang of 24.

Arguably, it didn’t need to be so messy. 

EU countries, on paper at least, represent a collective economic superpower compared to Russia. The total combined GDP of the EU’s 27 countries’ stands at €18 trillion while Russia’s GDP is €2 trillion. 

Even without including Norway and the U.K., Ukraine’s European allies have the resources to beat Putin if they really want to.

Perhaps most worryingly for Ukraine’s allies, voters in some of the EU’s biggest economies may be losing interest. A POLITICO Poll of 10,000 people in five Western countries found respondents in Germany and France were even more reluctant to keep financing Ukraine than people in the United States. 

In Germany, 45 percent said they would support cutting financial aid to Kyiv, while just 20 percent said they wanted to increase financial assistance. In France, 37 percent wanted to give less and 24 percent preferred giving more.

Faced with splits between northern nations that are tiring of spending endless billions on Ukraine and others that never have done, Europe’s leaders opted for the easiest answer this week. And even that was almost too hard.