European Support For Ukraine Remains Solid and Germany Is Stepping Up

In this week’s Europe Dispatch, Minna Ålander looks at fresh Europe-wide polling data on support for Ukraine and feels cautiously optimistic about Germany’s new moves on Ukraine.

Hi Everyone,

I was very sorry to miss my weekly contribution last week due to a very persistent flu that kept brain activity to a minimum. And what a week too, with Ukraine’s remarkable feat on Sunday targeting Russia’s strategic bombers in the Operation Spider Web. Phil has already analysed the operation in detail so I won’t go into it here. But I just want to highlight one thing that is very important from a Finnish and Norwegian perspective, sharing a northern border with Russia: Given that Ukraine hit the Olenya airbase in Murmansk in the Russian Arctic, only a little more than a hundred miles from the Norwegian and Finnish border, the Kremlin would surely have been tempted to suggest that Finland and Norway enabled the attacks from their territory. But thanks to the detailed information Ukraine published immediately after the successful operation, Russia had to admit that it was indeed Ukrainians alone who pulled it off. While only Ukraine deserves get the credit for this remarkable success, it also shows that Ukraine is a much better ally to us than we are to Ukraine, ensuring that the Kremlin cannot instrumentalize the operation against Ukraine’s partners.

Yours,
Minna

Is This The Start Of A Beautiful Friendship?

European Support For Ukraine Remains Solid and Germany Is Stepping Up

The newest Eurobarometer for spring 2025 is out and it looks like Europeans are net-optimistic about the EU. For those not familiar with the Eurobarometer: it is a Europe-wide biannual opinion poll (including also non-EU countries) measuring support for the EU and other relevant topics. This spring’s data includes a number of interesting record-high results: trust in the EU is at a record-high 52 percent (the last time a Europe-wide majority trusted the EU was in 2007). And even more interestingly, support for the euro as currency has soared: 74% in the EU as a whole and 83% in the euro area – the highest support ever measured. Also support for a common defence and security policy among EU member states is with 81 percent at its highest since 2004, but it has always been a policy area with high popular support. If you want to look at a comparative presentation of the data, scroll down to “Reports and data” and choose “Presentation”. The country-specific data is always also interesting to look at.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, support for Ukraine has been a standard item in the Eurobarometer. This support has remained solid, with the Europe-wide average even for financing of weapons for Ukraine still at 59 percent (obviously with considerable variation between countries). Support for sanctions on Russia has also remained very strong at a 72-percent average Europe-wide – further underlining the point I made some weeks ago about lifting of sanctions as a politically unpopular move in Europe. After more than three years of war and a number of refugee waves from Ukraine, 80 percent of Europeans are still positive towards welcoming them into the EU.

I always like to look at the country-specific data from Portugal, where people are for some reason consistently very supportive of Ukraine, with around or above 80 percent approval for support measures throughout the past three years of measuring history. It shows that taking Portugal as a generic example of Europe’s southwestern-most country with the greatest distance to Ukraine and Russia and assuming that people there “don’t get it” is doing Portugal injustice.

Another highlight from last week was a new cooperation agreement signed between Ukraine and Germany, with the provision that Germany will start financing production of long-range weapons in Ukraine. Interestingly, the press statement mentions that a “considerable number” of unspecified long-range systems will be produced already this year and the systems will be available to Ukraine “on short notice”, with the first ones to be deployed to the battlefield “within weeks”. According to the German press statement, Ukraine’s armed forces have already integrated these unspecified systems and therefore require no extra training. Fabian Hoffman has analyzed the long-range strike deal comprehensively in this piece.

This came just days after Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, had made a statement underlining that all restrictions on Ukraine with regard to the range of weapons donated from the West have been lifted. Merz was speaking not only for Germany, but also for France, the UK – and even the US. He specifically mentioned that Ukraine is now able to defend itself by hitting military targets in Russia, which is significant given the timing of Ukraine’s Sunday show targeting Russia’s strategic bombers on air bases thousands of miles away from Ukraine.

Another interesting element in the latest military aid package from Germany is financial support for satellite communications to secure the “long-term use of a satellite system” (Merz specified in a press conference that the system in question is Starlink). This is important given that continued intelligence cooperation with the US is under a question mark. The temporary halt in US intelligence support earlier this spring prompted Ukrainians to start finding alternatives and it has been interesting to hear they have been quite well able to do so, thanks to help from other partners and commercial satellite imagery. The latter is, however, very expensive. But for Ukraine’s European partners, the more the required support is just money, the better. What Europe was struggling with was the lack of sufficient numbers of equipment to donate and long lead times in production. Money is not the problem and Europe can keep supporting Ukraine financially for a long time. Last but not least, Germany wants to transform the initiative “Immediate Action for Air Defence” into “Enduring Action” together with partners. Air defence remains a core issue for Ukraine, especially with regard to availability of the US-made Patriot systems I wrote about earlier.

This latest support package and Merz’ very clear statements on lifting any range restrictions (which his predecessor Olaf Scholz was very fond of) sound much more like the Zeitenwende we had all been waiting for than anything else Germany has done for Ukraine so far. For the first time in the past three years, I am feeling cautiously optimistic about Germany’s enduring commitment to Ukraine. The domestic political situation remains uneasy for Merz and he has tried to kill the public debate about the German-made long-range Taurus missiles for Ukraine. But it can be better that way: Merz seems to have classified the contents of aid packages to have more freedom to manoeuvre around the topic that remains controversial within Germany (in an opinion poll from November 2024, 61 percent of respondents were against delivering Taurus to Ukraine). Needless to say that it makes a massive difference to have Germany wholeheartedly on board, instead of the constant lukewarm foot-dragging of the Scholz government. So I very much hope that this promising trend continues.