Europe has decided it wants to defend itself on its own terms after decades of treating military budgets as a line item to quietly trim or ignore.
The turning point was Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, though the reckoning had been building for years. EU defence spending rose from €218 billion in 2021 to an estimated €381 billion in 2025, according to the European Defence Agency, or a 75% increase in just four years.
