Kyiv dismissed the reformer who was making the concept of speed its defence ministry’s organising principle – just as Russia begins to copy the model, and days after Europe signed up to build on it. So what now?
Europe does not need to break with Israel. But it needs to stop pretending that three settlers and a fight over oranges are a position while the border with Lebanon moves north and a Nato ally, Turkey, becomes the enemy. The two no longer want the same things, and a vote in Jerusalem is unlikely to change that.
Responsibility for Europe reads differently from Bratislava than from Brussels. The new German defence strategy is worth reading carefully, particularly from the capitals whose security still depends on German territory. Responsibility for Europe will be defined in the next decade by what Berlin does if Washington no longer underwrites European defence at previous levels. Germany has now stated, in writing, that this is the planning horizon.
The Hormuz crisis is real and structural. The Druzhba pipeline dispute is a price grievance repackaged as a security emergency, and it is fracturing EU solidarity on Russia at the worst possible moment.
Today, with Iran’s supreme leader dead and the son of the CIA-installed shah coordinating with Washington on what comes next, Europe faces the question it has avoided for seven decades.
As the EU Commission implements its Preparedness Union Strategy announced in March 2025, Finland stands among the very few member states that have already operationalised what Brussels is still designing.
For Europeans, order is something the police restore under law, not something the army imposes under executive will. Fortunately, EU member states built constitutional architecture to prevent what the US Insurrection Act enables.