Why the ban on using EU funds for arms could become more flexible

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Good morning. Friday’s terror attack on a Moscow concert venue killed at least 137 people and injured 180. Islamist group Isis has claimed responsibility. Here’s our analysis on how the war against Ukraine distracted Russia from domestic security threats.

Today, I explore the push by some Brussels officials to see how far the EU’s laws can bend on buying weapons, and also hear from Finland’s prime minister about toughening border rules to stop Russia from instrumentalising migration.

This week marks one year since my friend and fellow journalist Evan Gershkovich was wrongfully imprisoned in Russia for doing his job as a reporter. Show your support for Evan by joining a mass run on Wednesday morning; either in Brussels’ Cinquantenaire park, or in other cities.

War budget

Could the EU’s treaties, long considered to unequivocally prevent the bloc from buying weapons with its shared budget, have been misinterpreted this whole time? That’s what some in the European Commission are hoping.

Context: Russia’s war has forced the EU into a top-to-bottom rethink of its defence and security policies. It has also sparked a scramble to raise money, quickly, to fund the continent’s biggest rearmament programme since the cold war.

Article 41(2) of the Treaty on European Union states that the budget cannot fund “operations having military or defence implications”. The Financial Times reported last week that the commission, the bloc’s executive, has established a legal task force to reassess what that really means.

The question the EU’s in-house lawyers are being asked to ponder is whether “operations” refers only to the EU’s own operations. If so, could the budget buy weapons for operations conducted by other entities (such as the Ukrainian army)?

Proponents describe it as a natural consideration given the drive to find more “creative” methods of funding, saying it would “streamline” existing off-budget instruments such as the Ukraine Assistance Fund which finances weapons for Kyiv.

Such a change would mark the most significant shift in the EU’s approach to defence since the formation of the bloc’s Common Foreign and Security Policy more than 30 years ago.

But convincing Brussels’ legal brains is likely to be far easier than getting all the 27 member states to accept such an interpretation. Especially the militarily neutral states of Ireland, Austria and Malta.

At a summit of EU leaders last week, various “innovative” defence funding ideas were discussed, including using the European Investment Bank to invest in weapons production and issuing new joint “defence bonds”.

“It is a bad idea, a bad idea to try to actually change the treaties on a subject like this,” Charles Michel, the EU Council president who chaired the summit, told reporters afterwards. “Now is not the time to open an institutional battle or a battle of competencies on such a subject.”

Chart du jour: Bank trouble

Poland’s central bank chief, accused of abusing his powers in a bid to keep the previous government in power, has told the FT he seeks a truce with new premier Donald Tusk over “idiotic” accusations.

Closed frontier

Finland is drawing up legislation that would dramatically overhaul its migration policy, in a pre-emptive step to protect itself from a feared move by Russia to use asylum seekers to destabilise the country, its prime minister has said.

Context: Finland shares a 1,340km border with Russia, the longest of any EU or Nato member. Almost all of the border crossings between Russia and the EU have been closed. 

Helsinki is worried that Moscow is planning to copy tactics used by Belarus in 2021 when it organised the journeys of thousands of mainly Iraqi migrants across the Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian borders, prompting a major humanitarian and political crisis.

“Russia is ready to continue its . . . hybrid attacks against our border, our common EU border. And we are preparing ourselves against that. We are preparing new legislation, new tools for our border guards to stop this phenomenon,” said Finland’s Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.

The legislation would give Finnish border guards the power to block the entry of asylum seekers from Russia, and is being rushed through parliament amid fears that the spring thaw will make it far easier for people to cross the largely unfenced border, which runs through open forests and lakes. 

In the last five months of 2023, 1,300 asylum seekers crossed into Finland from Russia, a more than eight-fold increase on the long-term average. The Kremlin has denied instrumentalising migrant crossings.

“I really hope we never have to use that [legislation],” Orpo told a group of reporters last week. “But we have to take care of our national security and border security. It is also the EU border and the Nato border. Russia is using immigrants as a weapon . . . and we have to stop it.”

What to watch today

1. EU environment ministers meet.

2. European parliament president Roberta Metsola travels to Slovenia.

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