By Sabine Siebold
MUNICH (Reuters) – European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Saturday she was confident the EU’s joint interest in getting more ammunition to Ukraine will trump individual national interests when it comes to common European defence procurement programmes.
The bloc is urgently exploring ways for its member countries to team up to buy munitions to help Ukraine, following warnings from Kyiv that its forces – which are firing up to 10,000 artillery shells daily – need more supplies quickly.
“As always in this atrocious war that Russia unleashed against Ukraine, we see that we can move mountains under pressure, and therefore here too,” she said in an interview with Reuters and other media at the Munich Security Conference.
“These are not normal times, these are extraordinary times. And therefore we should also look at extraordinary measures or procedures,” she added.
In the past, the focus on national interests has often prevented closer defence cooperation between European countries, hampering and slowing down joint procurement programmes.
In her speech to the conference, von der Leyen earlier suggested the EU join forces with the bloc’s defence industry to speed up and scale up the production of ammunition badly needed on the battlefield in Ukraine and to replenish stocks at home.
She proposed the bloc do what it did during the pandemic to prepare for the large-scale production of a COVID vaccine.
“We could think of, for example, advanced purchase agreements that give the defence industry the possibility to invest in production lines now to be faster and to increase the amount they can deliver,” she said.
Von der Leyen underlined that the bloc could not wait for months and years to be able to replenish its own military stocks or send munitions such as 155-millimetre artillery shells to Ukraine.
EU foreign ministers are expected to discuss the idea of joint procurement of 155mm shells – badly needed by Kyiv – at a meeting in Brussels on Monday.
“At the moment we are talking about standardised … ammunition that we would finance either on European level or member states level, that is the scheme behind it,” von der Leyen said in the interview.
“I don’t think that Ukraine will be in the position right now to finance that. Therefore we should finance this.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said this week that Ukraine was using up artillery shells faster than its allies could currently produce them.
(Reporting by Sabine Siebold; Editing by Matthias Williams and Helen Popper)
