“Veto on Bayraktar”: France and Greece block the purchase of Turkish drones for the Armed Forces of Ukraine
The parties justified this step by saying that only European products should be purchased for European money.
France and Greece, along with Cyprus, vetoed the purchase of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which was to be paid for with money from the European Union’s Peace Fund. This purchase was supposed to be part of a larger supply of Turkish-made defense products to “meet Ukraine’s urgent needs,” which was to be paid for by the EU.
However, France, Greece, and Cyprus decided to block this purchase, citing the motive that only defense products manufactured in EU countries should be purchased with EU money. This was reported by the French portal Opex360.
As the authors of the publication detail, Greece admitted that its decision was guided not only by the motive of “European defense autonomy” but also by the fact that it simply does not want to support Turkey’s military-industrial complex with its own money.
The French explained their motives a bit more circumspectly: “European money should be spent with maximum efficiency and to support Europeans.” But this raises the problem that, because of the French and Greek vetoes, other EU countries will not be able to promptly supply Ukraine with the necessary defense equipment.
At the same time, as the authors of Opex360 further elaborate, the EU’s “Peace Fund” is filled on a subsidiary basis, meaning that each country contributes its share proportionally. And it turns out that the largest share of this “Fund” is actually contributed by Germany, which at least does not publicly object to the purchase of Turkish defense products for Ukraine.
In addition, the portal’s authors describe another example: there has already been an episode when an EU country used the Fund’s money to buy non-European defense products, and it was Estonia, which was updating its weapons stockpile to replace Soviet systems transferred to Ukraine. However, no one blocked this purchase.
It is interesting that the authors of Opex360 also cite the following passage: if in the first months of the Russian invasion the Ukrainian military actively used Bayraktar TB2, now these drones are “visible” much less often, due to active counteraction from Russian air defense and electronic warfare systems. At the same time, they refer in general to the words of the Chief of the General Staff of the French Army, Pierre Schill, said during a speech in the Senate in November 2013.
