Europe Ready To Replace U.S. Intelligence For Ukraine
1- 28.01.2026, 17:07
- 1,378
Dependence on the U.S. can be reduced within a few months.
In the year since Donald Trump came to power and the U.S. refused to supply arms to Ukraine, European countries have been able to replace U.S. military aid quite effectively. The consequences of reduced U.S. support do not look as critical today as they seemed a year ago, when arms deliveries stopped and the Pentagon briefly even suspended intelligence sharing with Kiev, the Financial Times writes.
Ukraine's allies have begun actively replacing American resources with their own, Ukrainian and European officials told the newspaper. French President Emmanuel Macron said recently that his country now provides most of Kiev's intelligence information: "While a year ago Ukraine was exceptionally dependent on American intelligence capabilities, today France provides two-thirds of them." Ukraine's dependence on US intelligence could be significantly reduced within months, a Western official told the FT.
In air defense, Ukraine is still heavily dependent on US weapons, and European countries have been buying Patriot systems for it. But here, too, alternatives are emerging: it is due to receive this year the first of several new French-Italian SAMP/T NG long-range missile systems. France claims they are more effective than Patriot, although they have not yet been used in combat conditions.
Europe has been able to establish the production of artillery shells, so the Ukrainian armed forces have not complained about their shortage for a long time. In the early years of the war, the Ukrainian army was 10 times inferior to the Russian army in terms of artillery power. Because of the shortage of 155-millimeter shells, the Joe Biden administration negotiated with Israel and South Korea on schemes for their supply (mostly they were delivered to U.S. warehouses to replace shells sent to Ukraine). The EU was unable to fulfill its promise to produce 1 million shells by March 2023 - in this volume, production was only established near the end of that year. In this situation, the Czech Republic started looking for shells for Ukraine all over the world.
And now the annual production of German Rheinmetall alone will soon reach 1.5 million shells - more than the total output of the United States, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The war has largely turned into a standoff over drones. Ukraine remains a leader in the field, but Europe has also seen a slew of drone developers and manufacturers begin to supply drones to the armies of Ukraine and EU countries.
Totally replacing U.S. military capabilities in both supporting Ukraine and securing Europe on its own is the wrong goal, says Carlo Masala, a professor of international politics at the Bundeswehr University in Munich:
The point is not to be as effective as the United States, which will take us 15 years or more. We just need to be better than the Russians.
This is a "completely different" goal, and it can be achieved in the matter of self-sufficiency in European security in three to four years, Masala said.
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