Is It Now or Never for Europe?

One. Two paths to victory

Wars of attrition are rarely won on the battlefield alone. They are won when one side’s capacity to keep fighting outlasts the other’s, and the evidence of the past year suggests that Moscow understands this better than many in the West. Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute wrote in February that “for Russia, the plan remains to exhaust Ukraine’s capacity to resist”, and that “the Russians believe they can sustain the war into 2027”. A study published the same month by The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies was blunter still. “Russia is betting that European war fatigue will set in before the costs of the war become unacceptable for Moscow,” it argued.

Putin’s own words leave little doubt about his intentions. On 22 October, with talks once again in prospect, he said that Moscow remained “ready to negotiate and seek solutions to this difficult, complex situation”, but added that “in any case, all the objectives of the special military operation will be achieved”. Ten months earlier he had told the board of his Defence Ministry that “if the opposing side and its foreign patrons refuse to engage in substantive dialogue, Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means”.

Moscow could achieve those objectives without a breakthrough at the front in either of two ways. It could wait until the money and weapons that sustain Ukraine run dry, or it could hasten that moment, by encouraging those in Europe who would rather the money stopped and by deepening the divisions that make Europe slow to decide. That is the first path to victory, and it runs through Europe’s parliaments and polling stations rather than through the trenches of the Donbas.

The second path is Ukraine’s. Its army has shown that it can hold the line and, in places, push the Russian army back, and its President argued on 22 October that every security guarantee under discussion was “possible on the basis of a strong Ukrainian army”. A strong army needs money, however, and since American donations all but ended last year that money has had to come from Europe. The largest source that Europe has not yet tapped is the Russian state’s own reserves, frozen in European accounts since the first days of the full-scale invasion.

The two paths meet in a single decision. If the Union finds a way to provide Ukraine with the benefit of the Russian money, sharing among its members the risks that Belgium will not carry alone, Kyiv will have the means to fight on for years and Moscow’s hope of outlasting it will fade. If the decision is put off until governments less willing to take it have come to power, as the polls suggest may happen in France next spring, the chance may not return. That is why the question of Belgium, which sounds like a technical dispute among bankers and lawyers, may decide the outcome of the war.

Two. Washington steps back

From 2022 to 2024 the United States was Ukraine’s largest single donor, and it is now hardly a donor at all. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks aid to Ukraine, puts American aid in those years at an average of €38 billion a year, and finds that American donations all but ended in 2025. European military aid rose to 67 per cent above its average for 2022 to 2024, and the EU’s own institutions provided almost 90 per cent of Europe’s financial and humanitarian aid. The United States still sells weapons, and it remains, in the Kiel Institute’s words, “a key supplier of systems such as Patriot”, but it now sells where it once gave. When NATO’s members pledged €70 billion of military support to Ukraine for 2026 at their summit in Ankara in July, Ukraine’s European Pravda reported the day before the pledge that “the United States is not participating in this particular funding package”.

October showed how far Washington has moved. On 9 October, after a call with Putin, President Donald Trump announced a deal under which Russia would release large amounts of diesel onto world markets in return for relief from sanctions, and the Treasury licensed Russian diesel transactions until 7 April 2027. Volodymyr Zelensky called it “a weak decision by strong partners”. The next day, speaking at the White House about Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian refineries, Trump said that Zelensky “better damn well stop”, and added, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In September Congress passed new sanctions and duties against Russia by 86 votes to 11 in the Senate and 262 to 159 in the House of Representatives. On 16 October, two days before they were due to take effect, Trump waived almost all of them by executive order, according to an analysis by the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer. The White House said that enforcing them now would impede its efforts to negotiate peace. Zelensky replied that “the decision to undo all of this, to block all of it, seems wrong to me”. Two days later Trump wrote that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did”. On 21 October his envoy, Steve Witkoff, told Putin in St Petersburg, after Russia had released a prisoner, Stephen Hubbard, “You are a humanitarian also, sir.”

Washington has also shown a lively interest in Russia’s frozen money. The American peace plan that leaked in November 2025 proposed that “$100 billion in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine”, and that “the US will receive 50% of the profits from this venture” (the provision was reportedly dropped after talks in Geneva). This month, according to a report in India’s Business Standard based on the Financial Times, Witkoff and Jared Kushner proposed at meetings in Miami that the Europeans should move some of the assets into “a special-purpose financial vehicle overseen by Washington”. “European delegates, however, rebuffed the proposal,” it reported.

Europe’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, told the European Parliament this month that “American negotiators have been trying to push Ukraine into surrender for almost two years”. That is a harsh verdict, and American policy has not run in one direction only. A year ago the Treasury imposed sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies, citing “President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war”, and in July Trump offered Ukraine a licence to make Patriot missiles (an offer that, according to CNN, has not materialised). It is nevertheless fair to say that in recent weeks the President of the United States has appeared to favour Putin over Zelensky. Europe can no longer assume that Washington will be the backstop if its own resolve fails.

Three. The money in Brussels

The money at stake is large. When it tabled its legal proposals on 3 December 2025, the European Commission said that the Russian central bank’s assets held within the Union were “worth approximately EUR 210 billion” and represented “the majority of such immobilised assets worldwide”. About €185 billion of it was reported at the time to be held at Euroclear, and about €25 billion in other banks across the Union. By the middle of this year Euroclear had paid about €6.6 billion of the windfall profits earned on it to the EU, with a further payment of about €1.4 billion then due in July.

Since December the money has been locked in place more firmly than before. Until then the freeze rested on sanctions that had to be renewed unanimously every six months, so that a single government, such as Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary, could in principle have released it. On 12 December 2025, however, the Council adopted Regulation (EU) 2025/2600 under Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the emergency clause under which it decides by qualified majority, with every government in favour except those of Hungary and Slovakia. The regulation prohibits “any direct or indirect transfer of assets or reserves of the Central Bank of Russia”. Its measures cease to apply only when three conditions are all met. Russia must end “its war of aggression against Ukraine”, it must provide “reparations to Ukraine to the extent necessary to allow for reconstruction without adverse economic or financial consequences for the Union”, and its actions must “have objectively ceased to pose a serious risk” to the Union’s economy. Even then the Council must amend the regulation, on a proposal from the Commission, before the money can move, and the Commission must review it by 31 December this year and every twelve months after that.

What the Union has not done is use the money. At their summit of 18 December 2025, Europe’s leaders set aside the Commission’s plan for a reparations loan of up to €210 billion, because Belgium would not carry its risks alone and the others balked at the price of carrying them with it. When officials floated “uncapped” guarantees to reimburse “all amounts and damages”, Euronews reported, the wording was “too much” for the leaders, who suddenly faced the prospect of bailing out “the entire Belgian banking system”. As Belgium’s Prime Minister, Bart De Wever, put it afterwards, “there is no free money in the world”. The leaders agreed instead to lend Ukraine €90 billion for 2026 and 2027, “based on EU borrowing on the capital markets backed by the EU budget headroom”, which “would be repaid by Ukraine only once reparations are received”. They also declared that “until then, these assets will remain immobilised and the Union reserves its right to make use of them to repay the loan”. Twenty-five heads of state or government supported the text. The Czech Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, said that “the Czech Republic will not back the loan with guarantees, regardless of the alternative opted for”, and his country, Hungary and Slovakia were left outside the arrangement.

That loan has been paid out since 25 June, but it has a weakness that the reparations loan would not have had. Because it is backed by the EU’s budget, it required an amendment to the Union’s long-term budget, which needs the agreement of every member state, and Orbán held that amendment up from February until 23 April, eleven days after he lost Hungary’s election, in a blocking quarrel ostensibly over oil supplies through the Druzhba pipeline. The reparations loan, by contrast, was proposed under Article 212 of the Treaty, which governs financial assistance to countries outside the Union and is decided by the ordinary legislative procedure, in which the Council acts by qualified majority.

Ukraine’s needs are as large as the money. In November 2025 the Commission put them at no less than €135.7 billion for 2026 and 2027, and in February the International Monetary Fund estimated a financing gap of $136.5 billion over the four years of its new programme. EU diplomats expect the €45 billion for 2027 to be spent in the first half of that year, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported, and Reuters reported on 21 October that Ukraine’s unmet needs for 2027 were “now estimated at around €70 billion despite the planned EU contribution”.

How long, then, could the Russian money keep Ukraine in the fight? The answer depends on how much of Ukraine’s needs it is asked to carry. Under the Commission’s design, €45 billion would be reserved to repay the loans that the G7 made to Ukraine in 2024, which would leave about €165 billion. If that sum simply replaced the EU’s own contribution of some €40 billion to €45 billion a year, it would last about four years. If it paid for all of Ukraine’s external needs at the Commission’s estimate for 2026 and 2027, it would last nearly two and a half years. At the level of need now emerging for 2027, which is the EU’s €45 billion plus the €70 billion gap that Reuters reported, or at least €115 billion a year, it would last less than a year and a half. All of this assumes that none of the money goes to repay the €90 billion that the Union is borrowing for Ukraine in 2026 and 2027, as its leaders reserved the right to do. If it did, about €75 billion would be left, less than two years’ worth even of the EU’s own contribution. The honest answer is therefore about four years if the money only replaces what the EU already gives, and much less if it is asked to carry more or to repay that loan. Four years would probably be long enough to change Moscow’s calculations, even if it were not long enough to end the war.

The money exists, and the law keeps it in place. What is missing is a decision to use it. The European Council’s conclusions of 16 October do not mention the assets at all. They welcome the fact that the means to cover Ukraine’s budget and defence needs for 2026 “have been identified”. On Ukraine’s “pressing financing needs” after that, they say that the leaders remain committed to addressing them, look forward to an updated assessment by the Commission and the IMF “and will revert to the issue in a timely manner”. That is the language of temporising. Five days later De Wever told his parliament that he was certain the Commission would not propose any new operation involving the Russian assets, “because that is also what has been said”. Rikard Jozwiak of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, by contrast, had judged on 13 October that the question “is almost certain to resurface early next year”.

Four. Belgium’s fear, and why it is reasonable

It would be easy to cast Belgium as the villain of this story, and it would be wrong. What its Prime Minister has said, consistently, is that Belgium will not carry alone the risks of using Russia’s money. Arriving at a summit in October 2025, De Wever said that “Belgium cannot do it alone” and that others “must move with us”. He set three conditions, namely that the legal risks be fully shared, that every member state contribute if the money ever had to be repaid, and that other countries holding Russian assets act in the same way. His letter of 27 November 2025 to the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called the proposed scheme “fundamentally wrong” and asked for “legally binding, unconditional, irrevocable, on-demand, joint and several guarantees”. On 18 December he told Belgian members of parliament, “It’s not acceptable that this happens to Belgium alone. If we jump, we jump together.”

Belgium’s caution rests on solid ground. The first reason is an old treaty. Under an investment agreement signed in 1989 between the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union and the Soviet Union, investors may take to international arbitration disputes “concerning the amount or to the method of payment of compensation” for expropriation. If the agreement were ended, it would continue to apply “for a period of fifteen years from the date of its termination”. By May this year Russian investors had filed nine notices of dispute against Belgium under that agreement and a similar one with Kazakhstan, for sums that have not been disclosed. The second reason is a Moscow court, which found for the Bank of Russia against Euroclear in May, a ruling upheld on appeal in July, although Euroclear “does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction”.

The third reason is the money within Russia’s reach. Euroclear’s chief executive, Valérie Urbain, has said, according to Reuters, that it holds about €17 billion in Russia on behalf of clients, which is more than its core capital of about €9.2 billion. The fourth is Belgium’s own budget. Its deficit last year was 5.2 per cent of national output, the largest in the euro area, Moody’s cut its credit rating in April and S&P followed, and on 21 October its five-party coalition again failed to agree a budget for 2027. The fifth is that no lender of last resort is available, because the European Central Bank declined in December 2025 to provide a backstop, which it said “would likely violate EU treaty law prohibiting monetary financing”.

None of this means that the risks are large in any one year. The rating agency Fitch judged in July that the potential liquidity and legal risks to Euroclear from the immobilised assets were “remote over the next 12–18 months”. The December regulation already provides that no judgment or arbitral award obtained by Russia in connection with the freeze “shall be recognised, given effect or enforced in the Union” while it remains in force. Belgium’s point is a different one. The risks may be small, but they are not negligible, they would fall on one small country with stretched public finances, and they would last for many years.

The attempt to revive the plan this year has met the same answer. In a letter at the end of August the foreign ministers of Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands and Spain asked the Commission to explore options that would “ensure that the risk rests with all EU member states and where no member state holds a disproportionate burden”. At about the same time Belgium’s Defence Minister, Theo Francken, told the Belgian broadcaster VRT, in an English translation of his words, that “this is non-negotiable, the door is closed”. On 21 October De Wever criticised the Dutch Prime Minister, Rob Jetten, for saying that he wanted to “take that money”, warning colleagues that “even that kind of language” could have legal consequences.

Belgium’s objection, in short, is above all to lending Russia’s money to Ukraine at its own sole risk. It also has doubts of principle, and the legal scholar Peter Van Elsuwege names De Wever as the most outspoken of the critics who regard the scheme as “a confiscation in disguise”. It is worth remembering, too, that when the reparations loan was shelved in December 2025, it was not the parties now leading the polls in France and Germany that stopped it. Belgium’s centre-right government led the resistance, and Italy, Bulgaria and Malta joined it in inviting the Commission and the Council “to continue exploring and discussing alternative options” that presented “significantly less risks”. A plan that four governments in office thought too risky will not be rescued by rhetoric. It can be rescued only by an arrangement that lifts the risk from Belgium’s shoulders.

Five. What holding Belgium harmless would take

The gap between Belgium and its partners can be described precisely. The Commission’s proposal of December 2025 provided for guarantees from the member states “in line with their respective relative share in the total Gross National Income of the Union”, which could be “irrevocable, unconditional and on-demand”. De Wever asked for more, namely guarantees that would also be joint and several, so that if one country failed to pay its share the others would have to make up the difference. The heart of the matter lies in that difference, between a promise to share a burden in proportion and a promise to hold a partner harmless.

It helps to ask what such guarantees would actually insure against, and the Commission’s proposal is candid about it. The loan would become due only “when Ukraine receives from Russia cash or non-monetary assets as war reparations”, and the guarantees would cover “the risk of Russian Central Bank assets being released in the absence of reparations paid by Russia to Ukraine”. Under the December regulation, however, the assets can be released before Russia pays only by a decision of the Council on a proposal from the Commission, or by a ruling of the EU’s courts annulling the regulation, which the Bank of Russia and Orbán’s government have both sought. In money, therefore, the largest of the risks against which Belgium seeks protection lies largely, though not wholly, in Europe’s own hands. It is chiefly the risk that Europe itself, at some future date, loses its nerve and hands the money back without reparations, perhaps as part of a peace settlement brokered over its head.

Seen in that light, holding Belgium harmless is not a gift to Belgium. It is a promise by the member states that take part, as twenty-four of them did for the loan of €90 billion, not to hand Russia’s money back before Russia has paid for the damage it has done, backed by an undertaking to pay together if that promise is ever broken. A Europe that intends to keep its word should find the promise cheap to give. A Europe that does not intend to keep it should say so now, before Ukraine plans its defence on the strength of it.

The other risks are real but more limited, and the same instrument can cover them. Its guarantees would need to be joint and several as well as irrevocable and payable on demand, and to cover every kind of loss, including awards and legal costs under the old investment treaty and the losses that Euroclear would suffer if Russia retaliated against the assets it holds there. It would need a source of cash that can be drawn at once, since the European Central Bank has ruled itself out, and the other countries in which Russian reserves are frozen would need to take part, as De Wever has asked from the start. Much of this is already on paper. The Commission’s design of December 2025 offered guarantees shared in proportion to national income and, as a second line of defence, a liquidity mechanism “enabling Union borrowing to support repayments if necessary”, in the words of the European Parliament’s research service. It did not offer guarantees binding on every member state, which, according to the research service, would need unanimity and “subsequent ratification in national parliaments”. In practice, therefore, the guarantees would come from a coalition of the willing, and the Czech Republic has said that it will give none.

Would it be expensive? The expected cost depends above all on whether Europe keeps its word, since the largest of the risks arises chiefly if the money is released without reparations. Fitch judged in July that, with the money left where it is, the risks to Euroclear were remote over the next 12 to 18 months. When the reparations loan was on the table in December 2025, however, it put Euroclear’s ratings on watch for a possible downgrade, citing the legal and liquidity risks of the plan, which is why the guarantees matter. The maximum exposure is large, since the Commission’s design allowed for guarantees of up to the full amount of the loan, shared in proportion to national income. But the arithmetic of sharing is the whole point. A contingent liability that could sink Belgium on its own is a modest commitment for an economy the size of the European Union, and it would buy the assurance that Ukraine can go on defending itself for years at Russia’s expense.

There are costs that are harder to count. By November 2025 Euroclear’s chief executive had written to von der Leyen and the President of the European Council, António Costa, in a letter whose authenticity the company confirmed. According to VRT, she warned that using the assets would set a precedent, and that outside the Union the plan could be interpreted as confiscation, which could deter investors from European government bonds and push up interest rates. In the Commission’s design Ukraine would repay the loan only from reparations, so that the scheme is, as Van Elsuwege puts it, “presented as a reversible mechanism that is to be distinguished from an outright confiscation of Russian assets”. Whether investors and foreign governments will accept that distinction cannot be known in advance.

The moment for such an agreement is now. Twenty-five heads of state or government endorsed the principle that the assets would remain immobilised and might be used to repay Ukraine’s loan. Since Orbán’s defeat, decisions that need every government’s consent have been passing again, among them what the Commission calls the Union’s bisher größtes Sanktionspaket (“largest sanctions package so far”), adopted on 12 October, and the opening of negotiations on a further part of Ukraine’s accession the next day. That alignment will not last for ever.

Six. Britain’s part

Belgium’s demands have always reached beyond the Union. After the summit of October 2025, as the Brussels Times reported, De Wever’s conditions included the participation of countries outside the eurozone that also hold immobilised Russian assets, such as the United Kingdom, Canada or the United States. Britain, for its part, has said repeatedly that it would act with the Union. According to researchers of the Kiel Institute, from 2022 to 2024 it gave Ukraine more in proportion to the size of its economy than Germany, France, Italy or Spain. Its bilateral aid was worth 0.16 per cent of its 2023 national output in an average year, against 0.13 per cent for Germany and 0.05 per cent or less for the other three. It has also lent Ukraine £2.26 billion as its part of the G7’s scheme of 2024, to be repaid from the windfall profits on immobilised Russian sovereign assets, and it paid the last of that money in April this year.

Its ministers have said more than once that they want to go further. In September 2025 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, announced that Britain would explore a reparations loan of its own, saying that “this is Russia’s war, and Russia should pay”. She promised to consider only options “in line with international law and that are economically and financially responsible”. The British Treasury said that such a scheme would “work in unison” with the Union’s, according to Politico. In October the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, declared themselves “ready to progress towards using, in a coordinated way, the value of the immobilised Russian sovereign assets”. Later that month Starmer told a meeting of the group of Ukraine’s allies known as the coalition of the willing that “the UK is ready to move in tandem with the EU to drive this forward as fast as possible”. In early December, according to The Times, the government was considering releasing about £8 billion of frozen Russian sovereign assets held in Britain to support Ukraine, although the mechanism had not been finalised.

Then the Union faltered, and Britain stepped back with it. When the Union’s leaders set the reparations loan aside in December 2025, British officials said, according to the Financial Times, that London would not use the assets on its own. Any such move, the newspaper reported, was to be made only in close coordination with Australia, Canada and the Union. “We won’t move without international partners,” a government spokesperson said. In March this year a Foreign Office minister, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, told the House of Lords that “those assets should be used to support the people of Ukraine”. It needed to be done, she said, “in lockstep with our partners”. She also reminded peers that under the current sanctions regime Britain can “freeze assets but not seize them”.

How much money is at stake is uncertain, because the government has given no official figure. The figure of £25 billion that is often quoted is the Treasury’s tally of frozen assets belonging to, held or controlled by sanctioned people and entities. A later total from the Treasury’s sanctions office, £28.7 billion in May 2025, excludes sovereign assets altogether, according to Euronews. Britain said in 2023 that it was preparing to require those holding the Russian central bank’s assets in Britain to disclose them to the Treasury, which would help to give the government “a comprehensive picture of their value and nature”. Yet in 2025 it declined to give Euronews a separate figure for those assets. The best guide is the sum that the government planned to use, about £8 billion held in British banks, as The Times and the Financial Times reported. At the European Central Bank’s reference rate of 23 October that is about €9.6 billion, less than a twentieth of the €210 billion held in the Union.

The Russian money in Britain would therefore barely change the reckoning, set out earlier, of how long such money could keep Ukraine in the fight. What Britain can offer is a signal, to Belgium and to the markets, that the Union would not be acting alone. It could give that signal in two ways, which are not exclusive. The first is to join a revived reparations loan. The Commission’s proposal of December 2025 would allow it, since third countries could contribute “by providing irrevocable, unconditional and on-demand guarantees over and above the guarantees provided by Member States”, or by supporting the management of currency risk. A British guarantee would carry part of the risk beyond the Union’s borders, go some way towards meeting the condition that De Wever set, and add the credit of one of Europe’s largest economies to the pool. There is a precedent. In July this year Britain agreed the terms of its participation in the Union’s loan of €90 billion, and the member states approved it. Ukraine can now use the loan to buy defence equipment made by British industry, and Britain will make “a fair and proportionate contribution” to the costs of the borrowing. Talks on British participation in the Union’s new defence fund collapsed in November 2025, over a fee that, according to analysis published by Chatham House, was initially put at more than €6 billion. Such arrangements depend on terms that both sides can accept.

The second way is for Britain to use the money it holds. It could lend that money to Ukraine on the terms that the Commission proposed, repayable only from reparations, in a scheme designed to run in parallel with a revived Union loan. It would first have to settle the mechanism, which had not been finalised in early December, and any new legal powers it might need. In other respects Britain is well placed to do so, since, unlike France, it has no national election due before 2029. And it has promised repeatedly, with the rest of the G7, to keep Russia’s sovereign assets immobilised until Russia pays. In May this year the G7’s finance ministers and central bank governors reaffirmed that “Russia’s sovereign assets in our jurisdictions” will remain immobilised “until Russia ends its war of aggression and pays reparations”, much as the Union’s own regulation provides.

The Union is already pressing Britain, among other allies, to help fill the gap of about €70 billion in Ukraine’s funding for 2027, EUobserver reported on 21 October. A British loan announced before the summit of 26 and 27 November would help to answer that request with Russia’s money rather than Britain’s own, and show Belgium that it would not be alone in taking such a risk. It would also make it harder for the other holders, such as Canada, Switzerland and Japan, to stay on the sidelines. Switzerland has confirmed that it holds Russian sovereign assets worth 7.45 billion Swiss francs, about €8 billion, according to Euronews. The same report said that Japan is believed to hold between €25 billion and €30 billion, though Tokyo has never formally confirmed the figure.

At present every party is waiting for another. Britain will not move without the Union, the Union will not move without Belgium, and Belgium will not move without full protection, including, as it has said from the start, the participation of the other holders, Britain among them. Someone has to break the circle, and Britain could do so at little cost to itself. If it lent the money it holds, that money would be Russia’s, and the promise it would be keeping is one that it has already made. If it guaranteed a revived Union loan, its exposure would depend largely on the Union’s keeping the same promise. Whether it offers such a guarantee or lends the money it holds alongside a Union loan matters less than that it moves first. A Britain that led would strengthen the hand of those in Brussels who want to use the money, and it would remind Europe that defending Ukraine is not the business of the Union alone.

This impasse, in which everyone is waiting for everyone else and timidity tends to be the norm, is well suited for amelioration by the role that Britain has consistently played in relation to Ukraine. It has been willing before to break the taboos, the dithering and the impasses over arming Ukraine. On 14 January 2023 it promised Ukraine fourteen Challenger 2 tanks, which made it, in Al Jazeera’s words, “the first Western country to supply the heavy tanks Kyiv has been calling for”. Eleven days later Germany, after weeks of pressure from its allies, agreed to send its Leopard 2 tanks and to let others send theirs. In May 2023, according to the Atlantic Council, Britain became the first country to supply Ukraine with long-range missiles, its Storm Shadow cruise missiles, while the United States and other key supporters were still reluctant to do so.

Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who succeeded Starmer in July, told Ukrainians this month that “we are with you for as long as it takes”. His Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, told the Warsaw Security Forum that “Europe has big decisions to make, including on Russian sovereign assets”. “I think we need to return to this issue,” he said, adding that “Britain is willing to do this alongside the European Union”. Perhaps Burnham, like his predecessors, will recognise this opportunity to continue that policy line of unwavering support for Ukraine. He could affirm Britain’s willingness to lead not by might but by example, by accepting the lesser risk to ameliorate a greater one. That would reassure Europe and soothe its apprehension, and could overcome this timorous impasse.

Seven. Moscow’s other path: the ballot box

If Europe hesitates, Moscow has another path to victory, and it runs through Europe’s elections. This site described in September how the Kremlin seeks to drive a wedge between Europe’s governments and their voters, and the documentary record of those efforts is long. In 2023 the Washington Post reported Kremlin planning documents in which Germany was to become “the focus” of efforts to undermine support for Ukraine. A team assembled by Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, set out a plan to “reset the AfD” in “a proposed manifesto for the AfD”, although it was unclear whether the manifesto ever reached anyone in the party, and the Kremlin’s spokesman called the report “100 percent fake”.

In December 2025 the German government said that Russia, through a disinformation campaign known as Storm-1516, had tried to influence sowohl die letzte Bundestagswahl als auch fortlaufend die inneren Angelegenheiten (“both the last Bundestag election and, continuously, the internal affairs”) of Germany. It named Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, as supporting those behind the campaign, and summoned the Russian ambassador. In France the agency that watches for foreign digital interference, VIGINUM, attributes 205 operations since August 2023 to the same campaign. The reach of the four foreign interferences it detected in the municipal elections of March remained très limitées (“very limited”), but the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, warned in June of the prospect of menaces lourdes (“heavy threats”) to the presidential election.

Further east the methods have been cruder. In March the Washington Post reported an internal paper of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, authenticated by a European intelligence service, which proposed “the staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orban” to sway Hungary’s election in April. The Kremlin called the report “another example of disinformation”, and Hungary’s foreign minister at the time, Péter Szijjártó, dismissed its claims as “conspiracy theories”, according to the Hungarian news site Telex. In Moldova’s election of September 2025, the International Republican Institute observed “tactics of coercion, intimidation, vote buying, and threats of political violence at an unprecedented scale”.

It is important to be fair about the results. Orbán lost Hungary’s election on 12 April, and Moldova’s pro-European party kept its majority, winning 55 of the 101 seats. Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the direct reach of one Russian operation before Germany’s regional elections in September “appeared limited outside of amplification by media or other actors”. Its posts attacked the federal government and candidates of the CDU, the SPD, the Greens, the Left and the FDP, however, and “the absence of populist parties such as the far-right AfD and far-left BSW is particularly salient”, they wrote. A sceptical analyst at the Carnegie Endowment, Dimitar Bechev, concluded in September that “Russia’s machinations play, at best, a secondary role” in the fortunes of Europe’s right-wing parties, which “might even fail to steer the EU policy in the direction Russia wants”. Yet even if no major European country changed its foreign policy dramatically, he added, “Russia could score points by default”, since “assistance to Ukraine would continue to flow but in lower volumes, with fiscal constraints used as an excuse”. That is precisely the danger. Moscow does not need a friendly government in every capital, but only enough hesitation, in enough of them, for long enough.

Moscow makes little secret of its hopes. When a deputy leader of the AfD’s group in the Bundestag, Markus Frohnmaier, met Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation, during the St Petersburg economic forum in June, against the German Foreign Office’s explicit advice, Dmitriev wrote, “Looking forward to building a great FUTURE together with AfD, Germany’s most popular party.” After the AfD came first in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September, the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that “naturally, Germans, or at least some of them, are looking for an alternative to the current authorities”.

The parties that oppose using the money do not all share Moscow’s aims, and fairness requires saying so. In September Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella condemned Russia’s decision to place the Russian subsidiaries of French and other European companies under temporary administration as un acte hostile à l’encontre des intérêts de la France et des Nations d’Europe (“a hostile act against the interests of France and the nations of Europe”). On the money, however, the National Rally has resisted seizure. In March 2025 its deputies sought to delete from a National Assembly resolution the call to seize dès à présent les actifs russes gelés et immobilisés (“the frozen and immobilised Russian assets, now”), arguing that it would créer de dangereux précédents déstabilisant le droit international (“create dangerous precedents that destabilise international law”). They then abstained on the resolution itself, which called for the assets to be seized. In mid-September Le Pen told the television channel LCI that France could go on training Ukraine’s soldiers and supplying equipment, mais financièrement, nous ne pouvons plus (“but financially, we can no longer”). Agence France-Presse summarised her view as being that, because of the poor state of the public finances, Paris could no longer support Ukraine as much as at present. She insisted that this was pas un acte d’hostilité à l’égard de l’Ukraine (“not an act of hostility towards Ukraine”). Rym Momtaz of Carnegie Europe judges that, if elected, she “would halt French military support to Ukraine and suspend sanctions against Russia”.

Germany’s AfD is plainer still. A motion that it tabled in the Bundestag in December 2025 asks the government sich gegen die Verwendung der russischen staatlichen Vermögenswerte einzusetzen (“to oppose the use of the Russian state assets”), to take on no gemeinsame Verschuldung auf EU-Ebene (“joint debt at EU level”) and to end alle anderen kriegsverlängernden Unterstützungsleistungen (“all other support that prolongs the war”). The party leads every national opinion poll, at between 26 and 30 per cent, although no federal election is due before 2029 and it governs no German state.

This is where Moscow’s path and the question of Belgium meet. The December regulation means that no single new government can release the Russian money, so the danger takes other forms. The first is that the decision to use the money is simply never taken, because each election makes it harder to take. The second is the veto. Any new loan backed by the EU’s budget needs every government’s consent, as Orbán showed when he held up the budget amendment behind the loan of €90 billion until April. Since his defeat, however, the governments most opposed to such loans have chosen to stand aside rather than to block them. On 16 October Slovakia’s Prime Minister, Robert Fico, said of a new EU loan for Ukraine that “we [along with Hungary] will exercise our right to opt out and will not prevent others from doing the same”. Hungary’s new Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, supported that decision, according to Fico, and had himself said in April that “we cannot take on more loans”. The veto is therefore a power that a future government could use, not a threat that any government now makes, and a President Le Pen, with a majority in the National Assembly behind her, would hold it.

The third danger is a blocking minority against decisions taken by qualified majority, which requires at least four governments representing more than 35 per cent of the Union’s population. On the Council’s figures for 2026, France and Italy together account for 28.4 per cent, and with the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia they would reach 34.1 per cent, just short of a threshold that one more country even of Ireland’s size would cross. That is arithmetic, not a forecast, but it shows how few elections would have to produce governments opposed to using the money.

Eight. The calendar

The calendar explains why the decision is more urgent than it looks. On 26 and 27 November the Union’s leaders meet at a special summit to agree how to finance what Reuters called Ukraine’s “€70 billion unmet needs in 2027”, for which, it reported, member states “will have to agree on some new form of financing, possibly another loan”. They will also discuss the Union’s budget for 2028 to 2034, which governments need to agree “this year”, in Reuters’ words, before campaigns for elections next year “in France, Italy, Poland, Greece, Estonia, Finland and Slovakia politicise” it. A further summit follows in December, and by 31 December the Commission must complete its first review of the regulation that keeps the Russian assets in place.

EU diplomats expect Ukraine to spend the €45 billion that the Union has set aside for 2027 in the first half of that year. In the same months France will elect its president, on 18 April and 2 May. Before then, on 16 December, the Court of Cassation hears Marine Le Pen’s constitutional challenges in the case in which she was convicted of embezzling European Parliament funds, a conviction that the Paris Court of Appeal upheld in July while setting the enforceable part of her ineligibility at fifteen months, a period already served since the first judgment. She maintains her innocence and is appealing to the Court of Cassation, so the conviction is not yet final. If her constitutional challenges are not referred to the Constitutional Council, the court’s ruling on her appeal could come at the end of March or early April 2027, according to L’Express, a few weeks before the first round.

She leads every poll. Ifop, surveying between 17 and 19 October, gave her 36 per cent in the first round and showed her beating Édouard Philippe by 56 to 44 and Raphaël Glucksmann by 57 to 43 in the second. Toluna Harris Interactive, surveying between 19 and 21 October, gave her between 33 and 35 per cent in the first round and second-round leads of 57 to 43 over Philippe and 59 to 41 over Glucksmann. Polls taken six months before an election are not results, and French voters have rallied against the National Rally before, but Momtaz calls Le Pen “the runaway front-runner”.

France is not the only test. Elections are due next year in Italy, Poland, Greece, Estonia, Finland and Slovakia, and on 25 October Bulgarians voted for a president. Iliana Iotova, who, according to Euronews, favours dialogue with Moscow and opposes military aid to Ukraine, came first with about 35 per cent of the vote in the Central Election Commission’s preliminary count. She faces Andrey Gyurov, who took about 32 per cent, in a run-off on 1 November. According to Euronews, Gyurov has often expressed firm support for Ukraine. In Germany, where the AfD won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt and 38.2 per cent in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September, no federal election is due before 2029. Every state election is now fought in its shadow, however, and in December the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt is due to vote on whether to make the AfD’s candidate its premier.

Put those dates side by side and the shape of the problem is plain. Twenty-five of the Union’s leaders went on record last December in favour of keeping the Russian money immobilised and reserving the right to use it to repay the loan of €90 billion, and a group of governments is pressing today to use it. The government of the country where most of it is held says that it will not move without full protection. And a reparations loan, decided by qualified majority, is a form of loan that no single government could veto, provided that its protection rests on national guarantees rather than on the Union’s budget. Next spring the Union may have a French government that opposes using the money, and a loan that needs unanimity may by then be the only kind on offer. The decisions that matter will be taken at the summits of November and December, or in the weeks that follow them. If they are not taken then, the question may never again be put on such favourable terms. That is the sense in which it is now or never for Europe.

Nine. The price of waiting

What would follow if Ukraine lost? It is worth listening to what Putin himself has said. In 2005 he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “a major geopolitical disaster of the century”, in one contemporary English translation, or “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, in another. In 2016, having asked a nine-year-old boy at a geography awards ceremony where Russia’s border ended, he told him that “the borders of Russia do not end”, and then said that it was a joke. In an essay of July 2021 he described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” and wrote that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”.

In June 2022, comparing himself with Peter the Great, he said, in Reuters’ translation (the words in brackets are the agency’s), that “apparently, it also fell to us to return (what is Russia’s) and strengthen (the country)”. In June 2025 he told an economic forum in St Petersburg that, Russians and Ukrainians being one people, “in this sense, all of Ukraine is ours”, and that “there’s an old rule that wherever a Russian soldier sets foot, that’s ours”. Reuters described the first remark as a quip, and in the same session he said that Russia was “not seeking Ukraine’s surrender”.

None of these remarks proves an intention to restore the borders of the Soviet Union, and it would be wrong to present them as if they did. Taken together, however, they describe a ruler who does not accept that Ukraine can be truly sovereign except in partnership with Russia, and who has spoken, in the same exchange as the remark that Reuters described as a quip, of Russia’s lands as reaching wherever its soldiers stand. He has also warned that if negotiation fails, “Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means”. Where those historical lands end, he has not said.

Europe’s intelligence services have drawn their own conclusions. In an assessment published on 24 September, Denmark’s Defence Intelligence Service restated its judgement that within about six months Russia would be able to wage a local war against a country on its border, within about two years would pose “a credible threat to one or several NATO countries”, and within about five years would “be ready for a large-scale war on the European continent”. Those timelines, it explained, depended on the war in Ukraine ending or turning into a frozen conflict. NATO’s Secretary General, Mark Rutte, said in June 2025 that “Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years”. The president of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, Martin Jäger, told a committee of the Bundestag in October 2025, in Adnkronos’s English translation, that “we cannot relax thinking that a possible Russian attack will not happen before 2029”.

These are judgements about capability rather than predictions, and they come with caveats. Estonia’s foreign intelligence service judged in February that Russia had “no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year”, and the Danish service regards an outright invasion as “highly unlikely”, while warning of “a low but growing risk” of a limited attack. The Danish condition nevertheless deserves attention, because it turns the usual argument on its head. If that condition is taken seriously, the clock on Russia’s readiness to threaten NATO runs fastest once the fighting in Ukraine stops on terms that free Russia’s army for other tasks. A Ukraine that can go on defending itself is, among other things, Europe’s first line of defence.

A Russian victory would also put more of Ukraine’s people and industry within Moscow’s reach. Ukraine has developed, in the words of the EU Institute for Security Studies, “one of the world’s most capable and innovative defence industries”, which the institute, citing The Economist, expects to produce around seven million drones this year. In the territories it already occupies, Russia has conscripted Ukrainians into its own army. A report by the UN Secretary-General recorded in August 2025 that people from the occupied parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions had been conscripted, although “the occupying Power may not compel protected persons to serve in its own armed forces”, and Human Rights Watch has called the practice “a war crime”. The human rights office of the OSCE reported in July that such attempts “continued”. Should Russia ever absorb Ukraine, that record suggests that it could press Ukraine’s soldiers, under duress, into the forces whose growth Europe’s intelligence services are tracking, and the defence industry that Ukrainians have built would be under its control.

Then there is the bill, which Europe already faces as America steps back and which a Russian victory would enlarge. Bruegel and the Kiel Institute estimated in February 2025 that, without the United States, Europe would need additional forces with “the fighting capacity of 300,000 US troops” and an increase in defence spending of “about €250 billion annually (to around 3.5 percent of GDP)” in the short term. The International Institute for Strategic Studies put the cost of replacing key American capabilities, over a life cycle of 25 years, at “approximately USD1 trillion”. Europe faces costs of that order whatever happens in Ukraine, and a Russian victory would add to them. A study by the Norwegian consultancy Corisk and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, reported by the Kyiv Independent, estimated that a Russian victory would raise Europe’s costs to between €1.2 trillion and €1.6 trillion over four years, against €522 billion to €838 billion to equip Ukraine to win. It is a scenario study, written to make a case, but analysts at the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute reached a similar conclusion for the United States in 2023, judging continued support for Ukraine “far more advantageous and cheaper” than allowing it to lose.

Set against those figures, the direct cost of using Russia’s money is small, since it is Russia’s money. Even the guarantees that Belgium asks for would cost Europe little unless the assets were released without reparations, or Russia’s lawsuits and retaliation against Euroclear succeeded. The irony of the Union’s aversion to risk is therefore plain. In shrinking from a small risk, the largest part of which lies in its own hands, the Union is courting a far graver one. That is the risk of a victorious, emboldened and thereby empowered Russia making war on EU member states if it succeeds in Ukraine. Europe can still defend itself with Russia’s money. If it waits, it will have to defend itself with more of its own.

Ten. Either way

The war itself could still go either way. Russia occupies about a fifth of Ukraine, according to the Associated Press, but its advance has largely stalled. By the count of the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces lost more ground than they took in September, for a net loss of about 81 square kilometres, and have lost about 294 square kilometres net since March, as Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi pushed them back around Lyman. The Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState, which counts differently, recorded Russian gains of 154 square kilometres in September. Ukraine’s drones had knocked out about a third of Russia’s oil refining capacity by May, according to one independent estimate, and in July Russia banned exports of diesel to protect its own supply.

Ukraine, for its part, is bloodied but unbroken, and the war is spilling over its borders. This month two tankers anchored off Romania’s coast were hit by what a NATO military source told Reuters were Russian drones, Romanian fighters shot down two drones over Romania’s territorial waters, and five drones identified as Russian fell on Moldova in less than a day. There is no general ceasefire, only a local truce, agreed to let aid into one town in the Kherson region. Moscow, the Associated Press reported on 24 October, “has rejected a break in hostilities until a comprehensive agreement on its terms is reached”. Those terms include full control of four Ukrainian regions, the withdrawal of Ukraine’s forces from them, the renunciation of its bid to join NATO and a reduction in the size of its army.

Those are the terms of a victor, offered by a power whose army, in the judgement of Denmark’s Defence Intelligence Service, has “no prospect” of a major breakthrough in Ukraine in the next six months. Whether it can ever impose them depends less on what happens at the front this winter than on whether Ukraine still has the money and the weapons to fight next year and the year after. If it has, Moscow’s theory of victory, which is to outlast its enemies, is likely to fail. If it has not, Moscow will not need a breakthrough, because Ukraine will have been starved of the means to resist. The war could go either way, and which way it goes may be settled not in the Donbas but in Brussels, and perhaps the tipping point for what happens in Brussels may be in London.