Financial TimesFinancial Times

Arming Ukraine: How war forced the EU to rewrite defence policy

By Henry Foy

27 Feb 2023 · 10 min read

Editor's Note

The FT charts the EU’s dramatic policy shift since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—going from a rejection of hard power to becoming a big supplier of weapons for Ukraine.

It was three days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine that the EU realised that it too must go to war.

At an emergency meeting, Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, made the case to anxious foreign ministers from the bloc’s 27 member states that it was the moment to do something previously considered impossible: use shared EU cash to buy weapons for Kyiv.

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