Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez speaks to the press as he arrives for the start of a European Union Summit at the Europa Building Forum, in Brussels on March 20, 2025.
Photo: John Thys / AFP
While Brussels flounders on sending troops to Ukraine, it fantasises about setting up a fullscale EU army.
Europe can’t even agree on a plan to send ‘peacekeeping’ troops to Ukraine. Yet Spanish officials think it is time Brussels went further and established a full-blown European Union army.
About to travel to Paris for the latest round of ‘coalition of the willing’ talks, on Thursday, March 27th, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared that a European army
is the only way that we become a true union and guarantee a lasting peace in Europe.
The PM’s comments have received fairly limited coverage from the European press, especially given their significance. They included the fairytale demand that such an army should work “under a single flag with the same objectives.” Who, then, will decide these objectives? And what happens to those who disagree?
This, of course, is merely the latest in a long line of calls for EU militarisation, and further gives the lie to those establishment figures who told Britons considering how to vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum that talk of a Brussels army—united or otherwise—was a “dangerous fantasy.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to approve of Sánchez’s proposal, having previously dismissed the long list of earlier ‘coalition of the willing’ wishful thinking. He said on Wednesday it was “too early” to discuss the future role of European ‘peacekeepers’ in Ukraine—before informing the latest meeting that Europe should “prove” it can “defend itself.”
Igor Zhovkva, a senior aide to the president, went further, telling AFP that Ukraine needs a “serious” contribution from Europe of troops who are prepared not simply to ‘keep peace’ but to fight.
We don’t need a mere presence to showcase that Europe is present. We don’t need peacekeepers, blue helmets, unarmed, or whatever.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has already said he is willing to put British troops “in harm’s way” on the ground in Ukraine. But Zhovkva’s comments are likely to disrupt already struggling attempts by Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron to get more leaders on board with their troop deployment proposals.
Meanwhile, a senior Kyiv official revealed on Thursday that Ukraine and Russia have not fired on each other’s energy facilities since Tuesday, when Donald Trump’s administration announced that limited ceasefire agreements had been reached—agreements which Brussels has dismissed as failures.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
