Europe is flipping roughly 2/3rds of the bill for this war so far. They spent about the same as we did from day one and under Trump they became the primary.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/35554.jpeg
They are dealing with the majority of the refugees. We in fact took on very little of them!
They have supplied much of the military hardware, from day one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukraine_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war (look at the listing of hardware)
They will deal with the bulk of the post war clean up and economic rebuilding.
They are the ones from where the bulk of mercenaries and their casualties (volunteers from the West) come from:
https://strategic-culture.su/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/inf181_kia-01-scaled.jpg (2 years old, the numbers are vastly higher today).
What are you talking about?
It's four years into this war on their doorstep and if the Ukraine war ends, several hundred thousand Russian troops will be in western Belarus and across the river from Estonia. The Suwalki gap is something like 60 miles and Estonia is less than 250 miles wide. The Baltics and Poland do not have Ukraine's depth to cede territory while responding. Yet four years in, there's no comprehensive European build up or plan to correspond to the threat, although Poland and the Scandinavians have taken significant steps.
As you said, this is primarily a European problem for which they have the means to respond, but not the will or organization: they're still looking to the US for guidance and counting on US to be there first should SHTF.
Their support for Ukraine is laudable, but overall it's a failing strategy even in the near term. All these plans and pledges so far are just talk: the West Germans refused to cough up more than 1% of GDP even for East German integration, and I think a solid plurality of Germans would sign a new von Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement with Russia and give the whole Warsaw Pact back to Russia tomorrow if they could.
As I said in another post, Trump faces the dilemma of forcing Europe to be ready to defend itself first, with the US only as backup, while not allowing Russia a clear-cut victory in Ukraine. The major powers (UK, France and Germany) all seem fantastically recalcitrant to admit this reality, at least in terms of real defense buildup and planning. There's lots of talk, but little being done concretely. The French, for example, are using the EU/US rift to push the Europeans to buy French weaponry, but are refusing to share tech and production, so Germany just backed out of its joint fighter development program with France. Europe's real problem is political weakness and there is as of now no real political framework to fix that.
