MUNICH — European leaders should start to create a European army in response to Russia’s military build-up, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday.
“I really believe that the time has come that the armed forces of Europe must be created,” Zelenskyy said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. “Let’s be honest, now we can’t rule out that America might say no to Europe on issues that might threaten it.”
As the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion nears on Feb. 24, Zelenskyy said Europe needed to coalesce behind a single foreign and defense policy that would show America that the bloc is serious about its own security.
Despite steep losses, Russian President Vladimir Putin is adding 150,000 troops to his armed forces, larger than most European armies, Zelenskyy said, and is opening army recruitment offices each week. “Oil prices are still high enough for him to ignore the world,” he said.
There are solutions for that too. EU wide procurement agency is the biggest one. With some standards permanent staff and so forth. It is already pretty common to have multi national weapons development, like Eurofighter, Eurocopter and FREMM. Also some good weapons are already bought by a lot of countries and then modified like Leopard2, OTO Melara 76mm naval gun and so forth. So many projects have already quite some scale. Regional groups would not help much with that.
For stuff like logistics there is for example the Binational Air Transport Squadron Rhin/Rhein.