Ukraine is pursuing a multibillion-dollar arms build-up that would be funded by Europe, seeing it as the best chance of ensuring the country's long-term survival as American assistance dries up and Western security guarantees remain uncertain. Photo / Tyler Hicks, The New York Times
Ukraine is pursuing a multibillion-dollar arms build-up that would be funded by Europe, seeing it as the best chance of ensuring the country’s long-term survival as United States assistance dries up and Western security guarantees remain uncertain.
Ukraine wants not only to sustain its Army through the current war but also to make it the backbone of any post-war settlement, with the goal of deterring Russia from invading again.
As Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, recently put it: “Ukraine must become a steel porcupine, undigestible for potential invaders”.
At the centre of these efforts is a new Nato-backed procurement system that will channel European funds into buying US weapons for Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hopes the system will enable US$1 billion ($1.7b) in purchases each month, with a particular focus on acquiring US-made Patriot air-defence systems to expand Ukraine’s limited arsenal.
The new system would both help replace US arms donations that President Donald Trump has ended and also increase and streamline deliveries of weapons to Ukraine over time. A first sale of cruise missiles and GPS navigation kits, worth US$825 million, was announced last week.
Ukraine is also betting on its booming domestic defence industry, which has already delivered drones that swarm the battlefield and is now working to produce more powerful weapons.
Last month, Ukraine said it had completed the development and begun production of its first domestically made long-range cruise missile.
How far this military build-up can go remains uncertain.
European nations that are already grappling with budget strains may struggle to sustain the level of funding Ukraine says it needs, and Ukraine’s Army must address persistent manpower shortages to become a truly deterrent force.
Ukraine has few options other than bolstering its own defence.
Vague Western pledges of post-war security guarantees have yet to turn into concrete commitments, and the push for a more robust military reflects concerns that such promises may never materialise.
“The main guarantee of Ukraine’s security is a fully capable, well-trained army that remains in constant combat readiness,” Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s Interior Minister, said last week in an interview.
As the Trump Administration pushes for a peace deal with Russia, Ukraine’s Western allies have been debating security guarantees to ensure that an end to the war would not be followed by another Russian invasion.
Some European countries have signalled readiness to station troops in Ukraine, while the US has said it may send air support.
France will host European leaders and Zelenskyy in Paris late today NZT to continue the talks.
But these discussions have yielded few results so far, and Moscow has sought to derail them by demanding a say in their terms and opposing any peace deal involving the deployment of Western troops on Ukrainian soil.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia is continuing to resist allowing a powerful Ukrainian military to exist after the war ends, even as he tries to show that he is open to Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal.
Putin said that how to ensure Ukraine’s security would be “Ukraine’s own decision”, but that its security could not come “at the expense of the Russian Federation” — a reference to Moscow’s demand that Ukraine pledge to never join Nato and to limit the future size of its military.
So, Ukraine is focused on developing its own security guarantees that its much larger neighbour cannot undermine.
Ukraine’s domestic weapon production and its acquisition of Western arms are areas where Moscow has little leverage.
“This is not something the Russians can really discuss,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, Ukraine’s new ambassador to Nato. “That’s our advantage.”
Ukraine is hoping it will soon be able to rely on its new missile, which is called Flamingo.
On paper, it can fly more than 2900km with a 1130kg payload, according to experts, meaning the missile could strike Moscow and Russian cities far beyond.
Its effectiveness on the battlefield, however, remains untested.
Still, experts say such a weapon could serve as a more potent deterrent to the Kremlin than any Western pledge of protection.
“A mass-produced deep-strike weapon like the Flamingo is arguably Ukraine’s strongest security guarantee in a post-war European order,” Fabian Hoffmann, a weapons expert at the University of Oslo, wrote in a recent analysis.
Even if Ukraine’s Army grows, it could never match Russia’s in sheer size.
That is why Ukraine sees acquiring and producing more advanced weapons as essential to its long-term survival.
Ukraine’s belief that it needs to provide for its own defence is rooted in the hard experience of watching past security assurances collapse when put to the test.
Ukrainian officials point to the Budapest Memorandum, a pledge signed in 1994 that was meant to protect the country after it gained independence.
Under that accord, Ukraine gave old Soviet nuclear weapons back to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US and Britain.
But the deal did not detail those guarantees and offered no promise of military support in case of attack. Ukraine says the lack of specificity gave Russia free rein to attack, as it did starting in 2014.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine initially pinned its hopes on joining Nato, viewing the alliance’s Article 5 mutual defence clause as the strongest security guarantee it could aspire to.
Those hopes were dashed when Trump declared Nato membership off the table.
As an alternative, Ukraine’s European allies recently floated a security framework that would offer “Article 5-like” guarantees without admitting Ukraine into the alliance.
Ukrainians have greeted the idea with caution, warning that its vagueness risked repeating the ambiguities of the Budapest Memorandum.
“Any ‘Article 5-like’ idea should be legally binding and underpinned by a real deterrence force,” Getmanchuk said.
Still, Ukrainian officials acknowledge that building up a credible deterrent depends on foreign money to equip it with powerful weaponry that is no longer coming free from the US.
Acquiring such weapons was the main goal of Zelenskyy’s proposal to Trump last month at the White House, where he offered to buy US$90b worth of American weapons.
The package would include Patriot air-defence systems, the only ones capable of intercepting Russian ballistic missiles, which can cause devastating damage, as shown by the recent deadly strikes on Kyiv.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s European allies would finance the bulk of the package, most likely through the Nato-backed procurement system, which has so far secured more than US$2b in pledged funding from eight European countries.
The mechanism was created after the Trump Administration made it clear it would no longer donate weapons to Ukraine but would agree to sell them to European partners.
That places the burden of funding Ukraine’s military build-up on European nations, even as they embark on their own sweeping domestic rearmament programmes.
Still, Europe has already outpaced the US in military aid, providing roughly US$95b to Washington’s US$75b, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Recent pledges from Germany and Norway to provide up to US$10b each in military and civilian support next year suggest that Europe might be prepared to meet the challenge.
The large sums involved mark a shift. Previously, Western partners provided smaller, short-term financial allocations, often in response to urgent battlefield needs.
With larger financial packages committed over several years, Ukraine can better plan for the long-term task of arming its military, analysts say.
“The whole model is that we get contracts, written agreements, that state we will have this number of weapons provided to Ukraine by this year, from the United States, from the Europeans,” said Maksym Skrypchenko, the president of the Transatlantic Dialogue Centre, a research group in Kyiv.
Skrypchenko said Ukraine was working to channel Western money not only into buying foreign weapons but also into its own defence industry, which has grown rapidly during the war but still lacks the funding needed to produce at scale.
That could allow Ukraine to produce the very missiles Western partners have been reluctant to supply — or have delivered under strict usage limits — for fear of escalation.
The US, Britain, and France have provided small batches of ballistic and cruise missiles, but their use is restricted so that they cannot be used to strike major Russian cities like Moscow.
Germany has long refused to transfer its long-range Taurus cruise missiles.
Fire Point, the Ukrainian defence firm behind the Flamingo missile, said it would welcome Western funding to speed up production.
The company says it currently makes one missile per day but plans to increase output sevenfold this northern autumn.
Ukraine has also developed a short-range ballistic missile named Sapsan that recently entered production.
“The best guarantor of the Ukrainian independence is our own missile programme,” Skrypchenko said.
“When we’ll have several hundred ballistic missiles with the range capable to hit targets in Moscow, it will be a completely different game.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Constant Méheut
Photographs by: Tyler Hicks
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