After President Donald J. Trump severely curtailed US aid for the Ukrainian war effort, European Globalists jumped up ready to take matters in their hands.
But this stance was not an organic one, but rather a result of the ambition of highly unpopular heads of government like UK’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron, as well as Euro bureaucrats like Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen and new top diplomat Kaja Kallas.
The result is that you now have several competing and contrasting initiatives – and not one of them is evolving particularly well.
Kaja Kallas, for one, once held high hopes of raising as much as $43 billion in military aid for the Kiev regime.
But, as the EU leaders’ summit ended, Kallas’ plan has been repeatedly diminished, and is all but dead.
“The problems started, several EU diplomats said, from the plan’s inception when the former Estonian prime minister failed to win prior buy-in from crucial stakeholders. The process had been “botched up,” one of the diplomats summarized.
The original formulation of the “Kallas plan” had been to ship Ukraine at least 1.5 million rounds of artillery ammunition in 2025. That idea, presented last month, was shot down by a Hungarian veto. Then she tried again, banking on a coalition of willing states to dig into their weapons stores and national coffers to deliver up to €40 billion in military aid to Ukraine this year.
Unfortunately for Kallas — and for Ukraine — her plan didn’t survive impact with the reality of a European Union where interest in making sacrifices for Kyiv varies dramatically from country to country. Southern nations — much further from the Russian threat — are less eager than those in the east or the north. But in the end, even France, the bloc’s biggest military power, balked at giving a thumbs-up to the aid package.”
Two days ago, she already wrote EU ministers floating a way more modest plan.
“’The realistic plan would be the €5 billion for the ammunition and that’s what we’re working on right now’, she told reporters before the start of the leaders’ meeting. ‘This amount of ammunition is available on the market and could be delivered in 2025’.”
But even the diminished plan has failed to obtain minimal support.
On the one hand there’s a real Ukraine-fatigue in even the most warmongering countries, while others deliver their aid bilaterally.
Also, newcomer Kallas didn’t properly consult with the European powers before launching her idea.
She didn’t even have European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on board – a fatal mistake in the EU.
“The blow to Kallas’ authority is evident. ‘If you say everywhere, as she does and she’s right, that we need to maintain unity, then you also have to prepare such important initiatives in a unity manner’, a senior EU diplomat complained.”
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