By Elizabeth Pineau
PARIS (Reuters) -Europe needs a much more unified approach regarding the procurement of military equipment, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Wednesday, adding that the continent could not afford to waste time on unnecessary bureaucracy.
Pistorius’ comments came after a meeting between the defence ministers of Britain, France, Italy and Poland in Paris aimed at boosting European defence and providing security guarantees for Ukraine as Washington pursues rapprochement with Moscow.
“We want to procure more, we want to procure consistently and at the same time … we want to deregulate, at a European level, but also in our nation states,” he said. “We can procure more cheaply together.”
Pistorius said Europe could ill afford to have bureaucracy delay its ramp up in defence spending, which could also prove a boost to Germany’s lagging economy.
“We don’t have that time, it’s superfluous and costly,” he said.
European Union finance ministers this week began discussing how to pay for defence through loans to governments for joint defence projects – a move Germany in particular has supported – as well as through existing EU funds and by giving a greater role to the European Investment Bank.
French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu said about 15 countries had expressed interest in discussing a new security architecture for Ukraine, while British Defence Minister John Healey said work to build a coalition of the willing to support Ukraine’s security is accelerating.
France and Britain, Europe’s two nuclear powers, have worked closely together over the past few weeks to rally European support for Ukraine amid U.S. unpredictability.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov was invited to Wednesday’s talks, held at the Val-de-Grâce former military hospital in Paris, as were EU and NATO officials.
The meetings come a day after 34 army chiefs, from NATO countries as well as Japan and Australia, met in Paris for rare talks that excluded their U.S. counterparts.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s moves to build closer ties with Russia and seek to rapidly end the Ukraine war have upended years of Western defence thinking, prompting European nations to pledge Ukraine support and talk of rapid rearmament.
(Additional reporting by Christoph Steitz, William James, Geert De Clercq, Benoit Van OverstraetenWriting by Gabriel StargardterEditing by Peter Graff and Sandra Maler)
