EU Defence Cooperation: The Impact of the War in Ukraine

In the last twenty years, the EU has made increasingly greater efforts to boost defence cooperation among MS. In particular, with the aim to strengthen the EDTIB and avoid duplication of capabilities, the EU has encouraged ‘European preference’ in arms procurement and MS’ defence collaborative projects, also by seeking to expunge defence offsets -industrial and technological compensation to states for buying foreign weapons- from the single market. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 got many concerned that the ensuing Russo-Ukrainian war would weaken EU defence cooperation. And yet, eighteen months after the invasion, a systematic and comprehensive analysis evaluating the impact of the war in Ukraine on EU defence cooperation is still missing. This paper fills this gap in the literature by exploring three level of analysis - arms collaboration, arms procurement, and offsets- and by comparing pre-invasion evidence with data from the post-invasion period. The analysis confirms that the Russo-Ukrainian war has negatively impacted EU defence cooperation across the board. In short, MS invest less in EU defence collaborative projects, buy more non-EU weapons, and demand more offsets. Meanwhile, the analysis provides some surprising results that have both political as well as theoretical implications. Indeed, the evidence gathered here strongly refute claims of a ‘West-East divide’ when it comes to arms collaboration and arms procurement. Contrary to elsewhere argued, Central and Eastern MS show EU/non-EU arms procurement ratios similar to those by MS in Western Europe. Moreover, while MS in Western Europe continue to dominate intergovernmental arms collaboration, this analysis suggests that the relative bigger size of their defence industries, rather than their geographical location and foreign policy orientation, is mostly to praise. Finally and paradoxically, long-opposed by the EU for being market distorting and for aggravating the fragmentation of the EDTIB, defence offsets imposed on non-EU suppliers (the majority) can in fact strengthen MS defence industrial bases, shorten supply chains, and thus reducing non-EU dependencies.