I’ve been angry for a while, that the EU hasn’t seemed to take Ukraine’s defense too seriously (or at least once it became clear it would be a slogging war). They’ve given old weapons, and pitched in money to buy munitions and stuff, but it’s been clear from close to the start that the lack of munitions-building capacity was a big block, on both sides.

Instead of setting up new munitions factories, the EU has been content to send out old materiel, place orders from the same places everyone else is trying to order from, and let the States fraud the lead for European security. And Russia has used those exact same two years to set up munitions factories and secure supply chains from China, India, North Korea and Iran. It took eight months of Republicans dithering on Ukraine aid for the EU to finally step up and say, “Hey, maybe we should build a munitions factory!” – and it’ll be another two years before it’s up and running.

I keep coming back to something one of the Ukrainians (not Zelenskyy, maybe the head of the Army?) said in the fall of 2022: something like the West is sending Ukraine barely enough weapons to defend itself, but not enough to win. And if it comes down to a war of attrition, Russia’s resources will last much longer than the attention spans of Ukraine’s allies.