European defence needs resolve, resources and resilience to deter and resist the EU’s adversaries
The first priority listed by the incoming Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the EU is “Strengthening security and defence in the EU and the Euro-Atlantic area, ensuring comprehensive support for Ukraine and adequate defence funding”. This is a highly ambitious aim for a six-month term, but it reflects the seriousness of the security situation that faces the EU and its Member States – and the other democratic states in Europe.
Europe is threatened from two sides. In the east, Russia continues to wage a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine; it is increasingly coupling this with an “everywhere war”, as the Sahaidachnyi Security Center, a Ukrainian think tank, calls it: information operations, cyberattacks, sabotage, assassination plots, drone incursions and other hostile acts designed to disrupt EU support for Ukraine without starting a full-scale war. The number of these attacks, including several in Lithuania, is new; Russia’s use of ‘hybrid’ warfare is not.
What is new and more dangerous to European security is the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine and its ambivalent attitude to the Russian threat to Europe. President Donald Trump has allowed Russia to supply diesel to the US market in defiance of US law, refused to apply the sanctions against Russia mandated by the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act (which Trump himself had signed into law in September) and reportedly hampered (or allowed technology tycoon Elon Musk to hamper) Ukraine’s access to intelligence and satellite communications for several days to put pressure on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to end strikes on Russian oil refineries. In doing so, he has undermined both Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, and the credibility of the US as a security partner for other European states.
The Lithuanian Presidency is likely to have to navigate at least five defence-related problems in the next six months.
The first is whether the new MFF for 20282034 will provide enough money for defence. Member States pay lip service to the need for the EU to spend more on defence and economic competitiveness; but the Irish Presidency’s ‘negotiating box’, informed by what Member States have told the Presidency privately, reportedly maintains a high level of spending on agriculture and cohesion policy, at the expense of other priorities. Member States are making serious efforts to agree the MFF is by the end of 2026, to enable it to be implemented in an orderly fashion from January 2028, but past history suggests that it is quite likely that Lithuania will find itself still trying to broker deals between the Member States in the New Year.
The second is how to ensure that EU and national defence budgets are spent effectively. As the Russian threat has grown and defence budgets have risen, the EU has been trying to increase the percentage of European defence spending that goes to joint procurement, aiming to capitalise on economies of scale. European Defence Agency data for 2025-2026 collaborative shows, however, procurement that only accounted for 24% of total procurement expenditure in 2025, and is forecast to fall below 10% in 2026. The EU’S 2030 target that 40% of total procurement expenditure should be collaborative seems a long way off. Failure to procure collaboratively risks reducing interoperability, as individual countries procure incompatible equipment; may reduce economies of scale (with many countries procuring small production runs of equipment from national suppliers); and increases the likelihood that countries will buy major weapons systems off the shelf from third countries, rather than investing in developing European solutions.
The third is how the EU should relate to non-EU partners such as the United Kingdom, and to NATO. The EU is not made stronger by excluding like-minded countries from its defence programmes. The unreliability of the Trump administration makes it more urgent that European nations, whether they are EU Member States or not, should find ways to collaborate in strengthening their defence capabilities.
Transatlantic tensions also complicate the development of EU-NATO relations which became much closer after the EUNATO Joint Declaration of July 2016. While NATO continues to press for a transatlantic defence market, many European states are already excessively dependent on US weapons systems and defence technology. European Ministries of Defence can no longer assume that US technology will be available when they need it, if the US President decides otherwise. Yet NATO's integrated command structure would be hard for the EU to replace for the foreseeable future; and NATO’s members include important European military powers that are not EU members.
The fourth problem is how to support Ukraine militarily in the face of increasingly intense missile attacks from Russia; and how to assimilate the lessons learned by Ukraine on the battlefield into European forces. European leaders are discovering that even collectively, Europe and the US do not produce enough missile defence interceptors to match Russia’s production of ballistic missiles. At the same time, European and NATO armies have found in recent exercises that Ukrainians with drones can easily defeat Western forces. Ukraine has mastered the art of inflicting heavy casualties on Russian forces, while reducing the exposure of its own troops.
The fifth is how to respond to intensifying ‘hybrid’ attacks on targets in the EU. By describing such acts as ‘sub-threshold’, European governments show that they are unwilling to respond to them with force; the result so far has been to encourage Russia to escalate. It is only a matter of time before such an attack causes casualties. A Member State might then decide to invoke Article 42.7 Treaty on European Union (TEU), the EU’s mutual defence guarantee, as France did in 2015 after terrorist attacks in Paris.
Recommendations for the Lithuanian Presidency
1. The Lithuanian Presidency should work with the Presidents of the European Council, the European Commission and the High Representative / VicePresident of the Commission (HRVP) on a consistent public narrative setting out the reality of the Russian threat that the EU faces. The aim should not be to create panic, but to ensure that Europeans know that there is a serious threat and also that the EU is applying its resources to deterring and defending against Russia, including through working with likeminded countries. The starting point for a consistent European response to Russia is a shared popular understanding of Russia’s objectives and actions in relation to the EU and democratic countries in Europe.
2. Assuming that negotiations on the 2028-2034 MFF will continue into 2027, the Lithuanian Presidency should do everything possible to ensure that EU defence programmes are properly resourced, reflecting the threat. EU support for European defence industries should be seen first as essential for the security of the continent; but it is also a driver of innovation and technological advances, and a contributor to the European economy. In the midst of a European security crisis, support for the EU’s Defence Technological and Industrial Base should not be sacrificed to maintain the Common Agricultural Policy budget or other traditional areas of spending.
3. The Lithuanian Presidency should work with the Commission, the European Defence Agency and the Member States to ensure that both EU and national resources are used efficiently and effectively. Three important areas to focus on are, first, increasing the proportion of common procurement, thereby driving down the unit costs of systems; second, maximising cooperation with Ukraine in order to learn lessons from its tactical and technological innovations; and third improving co-operation with friendly third countries, particularly in Europe, with a view to avoiding duplicative programmes and capturing economies of scale.
This article is part of the 'Recommendations from members of the TEPSA network to the Lithuanian Presidency' read in full here.