EU countries will hold an emergency meeting on March 6 to work out how to boost defense spending and how to send more military aid to Ukraine.
Lithuania, Poland and other countries bordering Russia — which have long called on their neighbors to take collective defense more seriously — are seeing that as an opportunity.
According to Budrys, if countries aren’t prepared to take charge of both their own security and also support Ukraine, they will continue to be sidelined when decisions are taken about the future of the continent.
“If we are not showing the U.S. that we are stepping in with some big money here … I do not see the reasons why the EU, or Europe, have to be at the table when the negotiations start,” he said.
Poland is using its influential six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the EU to try and do the same, Warsaw’s undersecretary of state for EU affairs, Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka, told POLITICO.
“We need higher expenditures on defense in every member state,” she said. “From the begining of our presidency we were trying to convince our partners to think about security the way Poland thinks about security.”