"It will be interesting to see if the EU governments have the political guts to justify such a proposal," Paolo Raffone, a strategic analyst and director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels, told Sputnik.
"The European population is increasingly showing unease with the prolongation of the war and with further financial allocation to Ukraine at the detriment of European and national social policies. The EU Commission has proposed €20 billion in defense that adds up to €50 billion [$55.6 billion] in financial support to the Ukrainian state. This is an enormous burden to European societies. The consequences will be seen in the national and European elections. All trends indicate that right-wing parties will strengthen."
Under the EU plan, the bloc would not directly pay for Ukraine’s weapons: Brussels will help countries cover their own costs of purchasing and donating weapons to Ukraine or providing training to the Ukrainian military.
"We proposed the creation of a dedicated session under the European Peace Facility to provide up to €5 billion a year for the next four years for the defense needs of Ukraine," Borrell said on July 20. Thus far, the EU has allocated €4 billion for the military fund since February 2022.
The proposal came on top of Brussels' plan to allocate €50 billion in non-military assistance to Ukraine between 2024 and 2027.
However, during the meeting, Hungary opposed the €20 billion in funding, saying that it would object to it until Kiev removes Hungarian bank OTP from its "war sponsors" list. Budapest has repeatedly criticized the EU's engagement in arming Ukraine, stressing that it does not believe the Kiev regime is able to win.
The EU's Far From Perfect Economic Shape
The Eurozone is struggling with inflation, de-industrialization and economic slowdown, while energy uncertainty has haunted the union since it banned Russia's energy commodities.
Even though the EU survived last winter due to relatively mild weather, it's unclear how it would weather the next winter season. Speaking to Sputnik earlier this week, economic expert Tom Luongo suggested that the EU is about to slide into a perfect economic storm.
Raffone agreed with him, stating that "The EU Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen and Josep Borrell has willingly adhered to the White House policies, priorities, and strategies since the fight against pandemics. Such a trend is confirmed by a sort of 'compliance' to the US policies in a variety of policy fields: from the 'correctness codes' (woke, transhumanism, etc…) to the fight to climate change mutated into a financial scheme dubbed 'Green Deal', from the industrial and innovation plans condemning Europe to the irrelevance to the free flow of data (including personal data) across the Atlantic, from restrictive immigration rules to monetary decisions, and relevantly on the 'unquestionable' military and financial support to the Zelensky-controlled Ukraine staging a 'defense war' with Russia."
Per Raffone, the European Commission led by von der Leyen "has changed the traditional orientation of the French-German European integration process into the submissive integration of the EU into the US-led Atlantic and globalist strategic fight for American hegemony."
"NATO is not a defensive organization of peer allies but the American tool to convert the political orientation of European member states into a weaponized block against the rest of the world," the expert emphasized. "Today, Russia is the target. Tomorrow, China."
According to Raffone, Washington's rationale is crystal clear: the US wants to "funnel the European wealth and savings in support to the ailing hegemony of the US dollar" that has proven to be impotent to the rising of alternative systems of payment. The latter will put an end, or drastically reduce, "the seigniorage imposed by the US banks at Versailles and structured in 1944 by Bretton Wood and the so-called international rules-based system," the expert pointed out.
"Biden’s administration shows to have all the interest in prolonging the war at the detriment of Europe. The US administration is doomed, and the EU is following. The perverse logic is to sacrifice Europe so that the competitors, Russia and China, cannot get it," Raffone said.
One needs to wait until the next election and see whether the European public is really supporting the military spending spree of its respective governments.