Five European Countries Have Not Provided Ukraine Any Military Support
However, the top three countries are far from being the wealthiest in the EU.
The Gaze reports on it according to Dzerkalo tyzhnia.
In terms of the economic potential of donors, Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania have made the largest contributions to supporting Ukraine's defence during the full-scale war, while five countries, namely Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Malta and Cyprus, did not provide any military support, writes economist Tetiana Bohdan in her article ‘How military support for Ukraine is changing without the US’.
The author notes that bilateral support for Ukraine from European countries is extremely uneven. The Baltic countries, which are close to Ukraine or Russia, provide the most assistance.
Thus, in three and a half years of full-scale war, Denmark spent 2.75% of its annual GDP on military aid to Ukraine, Estonia — 2.63% of GDP, and Lithuania — 1.91% of GDP. Latvia, Sweden, Finland, and Norway have spent more than 1% of their annual GDP. The Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Croatia, and Bulgaria are also among the largest donors.
‘These countries allocated between 0.32% and 0.93% of their GDP to military aid for Ukraine. At the same time, the cumulative military aid from the United States amounted to only 0.28% of GDP,’ the expert notes.
A number of countries did not provide Ukraine with any military assistance, while others provided only minimal amounts: Ireland provided military assistance amounting to 0.02% of its annual GDP, Spain 0.06% of GDP, Greece 0.08% of GDP, Italy 0.09% of GDP, Romania 0.15% of GDP, and others.
Experts at the Bruegel Centre see these differences between EU countries as a manifestation of the problem of ‘collective action’. However, in my opinion, governments that do not provide military aid to Ukraine, when choosing between feeding their voters with butter and paying for Europe's security (saving the lives of Ukrainians), are in fact making a cynical choice in favour of “butter”," Bogdan concludes.
As the Gaze reported earlier Rutte Named Three Levels of Security Guarantees for Ukraine.