Four years on and European support for Ukraine has been stretched and strained but remains broadly intact in a way many would not have predicted in those early weeks after Russia invaded in February 2022.
European governments have redirected billions from their own budgets into military and financial aid to Ukraine. As that becomes trickier, and Ukraine’s needs have grown since US help tapered off last year, the European Union has been open to stretching the limits of its own rules to keep Kyiv funded.
All in, EU states together have provided about €200 billion to Ukraine. The US has given Kyiv some €115 billion, according to the Kiel Institute tracker. The flow of financial aid and donations of weapons or hardware from Washington was cut off when Donald Trump returned to office.
Commentators questioned whether Europe could keep Ukraine funded in such a scenario, but the last 12 months has shown a willingness by the EU to fill the gap.
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“Putin wanted a Russian Ukraine, he got a European Ukraine,” Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said this week. The war had been a strategic failure for Moscow, she said.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s plan for a short, sharp invasion that captured Kyiv and, soon after, the remainder of Ukraine ran up against fierce resistance.
“Our people did not raise a white flag, they defended the blue and yellow one,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video message on the fourth anniversary of the invasion on Tuesday. “Our people chose resistance,” he said.
The fighting bedded down into a grinding war of attrition dominated by drones, artillery and ballistic missiles, which saw Russia make slow but costly gains in southern and eastern Ukraine.
The US administration has continued to share military intelligence with Ukraine, something that has been crucial to help identify prime targets on the battlefield. Kyiv is still able to get American weapons and equipment it can’t produce itself or buy elsewhere, provided another Nato ally pays the US for them.
European support for Ukraine has shades of the “whatever it takes” attitude seen during efforts to save the euro currency during the financial crisis. A €90 billion loan, funded by money borrowed by the EU as a bloc, will cover a large budget shortfall that Kyiv is facing in the coming months.
Germany, the Netherlands and several Nordic states have traditionally opposed the idea of the union taking on common debt to pay for things. The significance of that taboo being broken to backstop Ukraine’s budget got a little lost at a crunch EU summit in December, perhaps because it was the week before Christmas.
Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orban, who didn’t raise objections then, has suddenly come out saying he will veto the €90 billion loan. Ukraine needs the money this spring. Brussels is planning to put significant pressure on Orban to withdraw his threat. Whatever it takes.
European support for Ukraine has hardly been unlimited. Throughout the war Zelenskiy has complained of long delays between promised deliveries of weapons or air-defence missiles and the equipment actually arriving in Ukraine.
Certainly during Olaf Scholz’s time as German chancellor you got the sense the EU was happy to give Ukraine just enough so that it didn’t lose the war, but never near enough to win it. Friedrich Merz has been more definitive in his support for Kyiv.
Economic sanctions are putting the squeeze on Russia’s economy and its forces are sustaining heavy losses on the battlefield in return for slow, steady gains in the east, but it is very hard to see any of that ever triggering some sort of regime collapse in the Kremlin.
[ The Irish Times view on the war in Ukraine: the EU must stand with KyivOpens in new window ]
In that sense previous promises by European leaders to back Ukraine to an outright military victory always rang pretty hollow. Trump has caused them to modify their language. It is now all about putting Ukraine in a solid position to negotiate a peace deal on decent terms.
Russia wants the rest of Donetsk, a strategically important stretch of heavily fortified territory in the eastern Donbas region it has failed to take by force. Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian public might have to decide whether handing land, and people, over to Russian control is a price they could pay to make the bombing stop.
All the talk about what concessions Kyiv can stomach assumes Moscow is genuine about negotiating a settlement. There’s a big question mark there. Trump hopes to force an end to the conflict in pursuit of that Nobel Prize, but there’s a far distance between the two sides’ positions.
I wouldn’t be shocked at all if Zelenskiy found himself recording another message to Ukrainians to mark the war hitting its fifth anniversary next February.
