"We have a simple choice," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said as he entered one of the most significant European Union summits in a generation. "Either money today or blood tomorrow. And I'm not just talking about Ukraine. I am talking about Europe."
Tusk stressed that Europeans’ own freedom is at stake on the muddy battlefields of Ukraine: EU countries can either pay to stop Vladimir Putin there now or fight when his troops attack them next.
Tusk’s equation – money or sacrifice – reveals the conflict that underlies all EU struggles to support Ukraine.
What exactly are the bloc’s 27 members prepared to give up in the end to save Ukraine and themselves?
The Brussels summit on Thursday night offered an answer: ideally, someone else’s money.
At 2:56 a.m. on a rainy Brussels night, EU leaders reached an agreement to borrow 90 billion euros on financial markets to keep Ukraine afloat for the next two years. "We made a commitment, we delivered", boasted European Council President Antonio Costa.
Beyond the official wording, the pattern is clear. A divided bloc of European countries has been arguing for months, publicly and privately, about who should foot the bill, and it is likely that this has not yet been resolved.
Europe has relied on American military power for its defense since World War II. It relied on American money for Ukraine’s defense for three years, starting in February 2022. After Donald Trump returned to the White House and cut off US funding this year, the Europeans increased their contributions, but not enough to fill the gap.
So influential players in the EU had to find another source to raise funds for Ukraine.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen knew how they wanted to get their hands on the money: by seizing Russian assets deposited in a Belgian bank. They have spent the past two months trying to convince their fellow leaders to agree to their plan to use Moscow’s frozen funds for a massive loan to Ukraine.
But Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever refused, fearing legal action and other retaliation from Putin if sovereign assets were diverted to help Kiev.
Instead, a Plan B was quietly being developed, which POLITICO first reported last month. When De Wever again rejected the idea of the assets, Merz withdrew his resistance, and the fallback option of using joint EU loans gained last-minute support around the summit table.
Under this plan, the joint EU loans would be guaranteed by the EU budget, which is financed by member states. Ultimately, Russian assets could be used to repay this loan, although this is not yet clear.
There is no doubt that Kiev needs the money. According to the International Monetary Fund, Ukraine faces a funding shortfall of 72 billion euros next year.
"There is no more important act of European defense than supporting Ukraine's defense," von der Leyen said on the eve of the summit.
Unfortunately for the Commission president and others who want to do everything they can for Ukraine, many Europeans still don't buy her argument.
The Kiel Institute has been tracking support for Ukraine since Putin's full-scale invasion in 2022. Its latest update reveals the holes European countries are leaving in Kiev's finances.
In a report earlier this month, analysts at Kiel said new aid in 2025 could fall to its lowest level since the outbreak of the war in 2022 and is on track to be well below the level needed to fill the gap left by America's withdrawal.
At the same time, the gap in contributions between European countries has widened.
While France, Germany and the UK have significantly increased their contributions to Ukraine, Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, Norway and Denmark have remained far ahead in terms of the percentages of GDP they spend.
However, Italy and Spain "contributed very little," the Kiel Institute said. The same dynamic was observed in the run-up to the summit. Southern EU countries joined Belgium in opposing the reparations loan plan, while Germany and the Scandinavian countries pushed hard for its adoption.
Under the terms of the final summit agreement, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia will not participate in the Ukraine financing plan at all. The EU of 27 has become a gang of 24.
Maybe it didn’t have to be so chaotic.
The EU countries, at least on paper, represent a collective economic superpower compared to Russia. The combined GDP of the 27 EU countries is €18 trillion, while Russia’s GDP is €2 trillion.
Even without Norway and Britain, Ukraine’s European allies have the resources to defeat Putin if they really wanted to.
Perhaps most worryingly for Ukraine’s allies is that voters in some of the EU’s largest economies may be losing interest. A "Politico" poll among 10,000 people in five Western countries found that respondents in Germany and France were even more reluctant to continue funding Ukraine than people in the United States.
In Germany, 45% said they would support reducing financial aid to Kiev, while only 20% said they wanted to increase financial aid. In France, 37% wanted to give less, while 24% preferred to give more.
Faced with divisions between northern countries that are tired of spending endless billions on Ukraine and others that have never done so, European leaders chose the easiest answer this week. And even that turned out to be too difficult.