The NATO Defense College Foundation (NDCF) summary of the round table on the build-up of the European Pillar within the Atlantic Alliance, held on July 11, this year, outlines a simple bargain: Europe must turn ambition into armories, process into production, and grand strategies into trains of kit moving east. Read alongside the Kiel Institute’s latest Ukraine Support Tracker, after three years of the large-scale war, we are finally seeing a change in how the EU is reacting to Russian Aggression.
Europe is not only talking about a larger defense pillar, but is beginning to finance one the way wars are actually sustained – through factories, contracts, and predictable cashflows. Together these threads show how Ukraine’s survival, and Europe’s credibility, now hinge on industrial stamina as much as on tactics at the front.
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Kiel’s August 2025 update finds Europe has now overtaken the United States in weapons supplied to Ukraine via procurement contracts rather than from existing stockpiles. Of the €10.5 billion in European military aid allocated in May-June 2025, at least €4.6 billion flowed through the defense industry, a cumulative total of €35.1 billion since the start of the war, €4.4 billion more than the US on this measure. This marks a structural shift from emptying cupboards to placing orders, with delivery schedules, penalties, and scale effects attached.
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This sits squarely in the outlines of the NDCF, placing capability targets first, money second, and providing skilled people to make the plan real. Without engineers, coders and technicians, particularly in AI and quantum fields, the headline spending agreed at The Hague is “rather abstract.” Europe needs training pipelines and recruitment that match its declared ambitions, or Ukraine will continue to feel the shortfall in the things that matter most: air defense, long-range munitions, and strategic lift.
Industrial organization remains the squeaky hinge on which all this operates. Europe has a habit of building three solutions to one problem.
The immediate battlefield relevance is brutal. The Kiel Institute summary underscores that stocks of launchers and missiles are “totally insufficient.” Two years saw 450 missiles fired from just one British system while reserves remained low, and Europe has not a single aircraft in the strategic transport class. Every one of those deficits is a Ukrainian problem before it becomes a European one. The Kiel numbers suggest Europe has begun to address this, by ordering rather than scrounging, but they also imply a race between production lines and Russia’s capacity for attrition of Ukrainian defenses.
Money for the long war is slowly being regularized. Kiel’s tracker notes around €6.3 billion in fresh G7 financial aid in May-June 2025, much of it via the Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) loans backed by proceeds from frozen Russian assets. The mechanism totals €45 billion and is already disbursing €2 billion from the EU, €1.5 billion from Canada, roughly €2.8 billion from Japan. For Kyiv, this is the lifeblood that keeps the state functioning while shells and interceptors take priority at the front. Yet, for Kyiv, this is a precarious situation as once the October 2024 pledges are fully disbursed, donors must either refresh the pot or risk a fiscal cliff.
Industrial organization remains the squeaky hinge on which all this operates. The NDCF summary is unsentimental about Europe’s habit of building three solutions to one problem. Fragmentation across aircraft, tanks, and naval platforms drives unit costs up and readiness down, “as the Ukrainian forces have painfully experienced” when operating a patchwork fleet. Future Combat Air System discord, dual German tank lines, Korean imports in Poland, and British upgrades inching toward ammunition interoperability are both politically explicable and operationally costly. The cure is not a slogan but coordination: joint procurement, standardization, and a rationalized base that can do long production runs at speed.
Kiel’s detail helps to anchor this in the present tense. Germany’s €5 billion package led the late-spring update, with Norway at €1.5 billion and Belgium at €1.2 billion, while the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Denmark each added roughly €500-600 million. Crucially, an increasing share of these sums is tied to contracts with firms in Europe and Ukraine, knitting Ukrainian manufacturers into the supply chain that equips their own troops. That is the right kind of interdependence.
Europe is beginning to finance the war the way wars are actually won, by buying at scale, ruthlessly standardizing, and wiring the money so the factories run on time.
Still, there are seemingly basic points that the NDCF feel remain unaddressed: simplifying national and cross-border regulations, easing information exchange, creating subsidized loans, considering selective debt mutualization through Eurobonds, and needing to debate an EU-wide method for counting security spending aligned with NATO’s. These are the levers that turn appropriations into throughput, and throughput into air defense batteries that arrive before the next missile wave.
If nearly all Europeans see themselves as both EU and NATO citizens, then the machinery should reflect it: share capability targets with EU bodies, bring the European Defense Agency and EU Military Staff fully into allied discussions, spread NATO interoperability standards, and, where sensible, extend Berlin Plus so EU missions can draw on NATO assets without duplication. For Ukraine, this reduces friction in training, sustainment and the legalities that often hold up deliveries more than factory capacity does.
In light of all these suggestions, two hard truths remain. First, logistics and manpower still herald Europe’s downfall. Russia’s ambition for 1.6 million under arms and millions more in reserve, sharply contrasts to Europe balking at conscription and struggling to recruit. Spending must combine “modern equipment, realistic training and robust logistics” or face a foe with an army full of gear with no operators of logistical support. Ukraine’s daily experience proves that the US standard of nine logisticians per frontline soldier beat two every time.
Second, nuclear deterrence will not be Europeanized quickly. The US guarantee remains the anchor as long as an American SACEUR commands and 100,000 US troops are stationed in Europe. Replacing this outright would, even on preliminary figures, demand defense spending of around 8% of GDP for two decades.
If there is a silver lining, it is that Europe is beginning to finance the war the way wars are actually won, by buying at scale, ruthlessly standardizing, and wiring the money so the factories run on time. For Ukraine, the task now is to apply constant pressure to keep that flywheel spinning, turning each pledge into a contract, each contract into a delivery date, and each delivery into a small but steady result on the battlefield.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.