After a day of informal discussions in Stockholm, the High Representative, Josep Borrell, presented his plan to European defense ministers faced with falling stocks of arms and ammunition in the context of the war in Ukraine. A plan that would mobilize two billion euros.
The urgency consists in supplying ammunition to the Ukrainian army as quickly as possible without further damaging the stocks of the European armies. “To win the peace, Ukraine needs to win the war”, he hammered before unfolding his plan in three “complementary and inseparable” parts.
The “European Peace Facility”, the European fund that allows member states to be reimbursed for weapons delivered to Ukraine, needs, according to Borrell, to be bailed out with an additional one billion euros. There, it is a question of supplying 155 mm or 152 mm shells to the Ukrainian army from stocks of European armies or orders in transit.
Finally, in the longer term, the challenge is to strengthen the base of defense industries in Europe, which is very weak compared to the United States where military spending is five times higher. “We are in times of war and we must have, sorry to say, a war mentality,” he continued. I would rather talk about peace, I would much rather talk about peace, negotiations, but unfortunately I have to talk about ammunition because the war continues to rage. That’s what we have to do today: keep the door open, at all times, for any kind of peace negotiations, but today we have to reduce the time and increase our ammunition deliveries. »
According to Borrell, the defense ministers of the 27 expressed “general agreement” to his proposals although “issues remain outstanding” and details of implementation to be worked out. He nevertheless hopes to obtain validation of his three-point plan at the next European Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense on March 20, in Brussels.
For his part, the Commissioner for Defense, Thierry Breton, has made his teams work to carry out a precise mapping of European ammunition factories. They are a total of fifteen distributed among 11 main countries. Europe’s capabilities are naturally much less than those of North America when it comes to small and medium caliber ammunition.
According to a report by the National Assembly in December 2015, the sector is occupied in Europe by a few large companies, the French Nexter Munitions for the medium and large caliber, the British BAE and the German Rheinmetall. Then come the Norwegian Nammo, the Italian OTO Melara of the Finmeccanica group, the Swiss SBDS, a subsidiary of SAAB, the British Chemring, the German Diehl, the Spanish Expal, the Swiss RUAG and the German MEN. The explosives and powder sector also has a few players in Europe: Eurenco, Europe’s leading explosives producer and second powder producer, and its competitor Nitrochemie, a subsidiary of Rheinmetall and RUAG.
