Europe’s top defense ministers back Ukraine, won’t promise troops

PARIS — Defense ministers from Europe’s five biggest military spenders said they’ll continue to support Ukraine in case of a ceasefire or peace deal with Russia, without going so far as to promise troops to secure an agreement, after meeting in Paris on Wednesday.

“The real negotiations are about to begin,” French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said at a press conference in the French capital, in response to a question whether the five countries plan to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. “It’s clear that media time moves faster than diplomatic and military time.”

France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland and Italy met to discuss peace in Ukraine and the defense of Europe, as the United States looks ready to reduce its commitments to security on the continent. The five countries are Europe’s biggest defense spenders, with combined spending of an estimated $314 billion in 2024, based on NATO data.

The meeting comes after the U.S. and Ukraine endorsed a proposal for a 30-day ceasefire Tuesday, which now awaits Russia’s response. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the ceasefire would allow the sides to prepare for an actual end to the war that followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, including security guarantees for his country.

The agreement reached between the U.S. and Ukraine was “a vital step,” and now it’s up to Russian President Vladimir Putin to prove that he wants peace, U.K. Secretary for Defence John Healey said. The ball is in Putin’s court, German Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius said.

The European countries don’t want a peace deal in Ukraine to resemble the Yalta Conference, in which Europe was carved up in spheres of influence, nor the Budapest Memorandum under which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for assurances, nor the Minsk agreements that resulted in ceasefires with no security guarantees, Lecornu said.

Lecornu said there’s no question of demilitarization of Ukraine, and the country’s best security guarantee is its armed forces. Keeping Russia “as far away as possible from our countries” means supporting Ukraine, Poland’s Minister of Defence Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said.

Lecornu said chiefs of staffs have started work on short- and medium-term scenarios that would allow policy makers to reflect on what a security architecture for Ukraine could look like. Topics that would need to be dealt with urgently are security in the Black Sea and the security of nuclear power plants in Ukraine, he said.

“The reality is that it’s a long-term affair that also allows us to think more globally about protection and Europe’s defense plan,” Lecornu said. The security of Europe faces the Russian threat as well as the “maybe unpredictable nature of the American ally,” according to Lecornu.

America’s pivot away from Europe was clear before the election of President Donald Trump, but the pace and extent to which that would happen remained uncertain, Pistorius said.

“Therefore, the challenge for us is not to adapt to this, but to pick up the pace,” Pistorius said. He called for working on a road map with the U.S. to ensure the burden shifting is organized and done step by step, “so that we do not run the risk of falling into dangerous capability gaps.”

A peaceful Europe and a strong NATO are in America’s interest, according to Healey. He said U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made clear that the challenge to European nations to step up on defense doesn’t mean the U.S. stepping away from Ukraine or European security.

Priorities for Europe include air defense, both against high-end threats and drones.

“We need to completely rethink” part of Europe’s ground-based air defense, according to Lecornu. He said the five ministers discussed speeding up existing capacity plans, which are taking too long and moving ahead too slowly.

Lecornu said he would like discussions about converging with Germany’s European Sky Shield Initiative. France and Italy have so far remained outside of the plan, after Germany proposed the U.S.-made Patriot system instead of the French-Italian SAMP/T as the long-range component.

Space is a second priority, with a “tremendous risk” of Europe falling behind, according to Lecornu. He cited dependence on Starlink, with the European alternative IRIS2 still appearing far away, and said the five ministers agreed on the need to accelerate on space questions.

France has made proposals, together with Germany, to move forward on early warning systems to detect missile launches from Russian and Iran using satellite and radar, which Lecornu said is a “formidable” issue both in terms of technology as well as budget, but “one of the topics on which we need to make progress.”

The ministers discussed bottlenecks in the European defense industry supply chain, and solutions such as bringing some production back to the continent. This “relocalization agenda” could be very expensive when done by individual countries, but can be more easily shared between nations, Lecornu said.

Scaling up European defense output will require investing in new production lines, which Lecornu described as a “chicken-and-egg problem,” as continuing to buy military equipment outside the continent means Europe wouldn’t achieve the critical mass necessary to finance new manufacturing capacity. He said one option is more licensed production between European countries, which would provide local employment.

European countries still have too many different large weapon systems, Pistorius said. He said the ministers have identified three steps to allow for faster and less bureaucratic joint procurement, including standardization of how governments formulate capability requests, more joint framework contracts and implementing uniform weapon-system certification across European countries.

“I am convinced that if we act now, if we choose security in Europe over the nitty-gritty of national interests, we will emerge from this situation strengthened,” Pistorius said.