Andrius Kubilius was leading the main opposition party in Lithuania, when migration started to dominate the European political agenda.
It was 2015, the year in which more than a million migrants and refugees sought protection or a better life in the European Union. The majority had made the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean Sea, many fleeing the Syrian civil war.
As the first points of arrival, southern states such as Greece and Italy were under pressure and struggling to cope. Huge numbers of people travelled farther on to Germany and other states in western Europe.
As a small Baltic country of 2.9 million in the northeastern corner of the EU, the migration crisis, as it was called, seemed very far away from Lithuania.
Kubilius, who had previously twice served as prime minister, recently admitted that, in 2015, the Lithuanian political system was pretty indifferent to the pressure migration was putting on southern EU states.
Kubilius recently became the first European commissioner for defence and, a decade on, his thinking has changed.
Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago gave him a different perspective on the value of solidarity between the EU’s 27 states.
As tanks rolled towards Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, the threat of a future Russian attack on an EU state near Russia suddenly seemed very real.
Poland, Lithuania and its two Baltic neighbours, Estonia and Latvia, as well as Nordic states Finland, Sweden, Denmark have all thrown their weight behind Ukraine.
The EU’s northern and eastern blocs have also taken their own defence more seriously, moving away from a peacetime footing.
Poland is drawing up plans for where to dig anti-tank trenches and stockpile landmines along its eastern border, to slow down any invading force. Lithuania is building air-raid shelters. Sweden and Finland have both joined the Nato western military alliance, which views an attack against one member as an attack on all.
Defence policy has always been the strict domain of national capitals. The European Commission had no real role or competence in the area. That began to change after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
The EU placed sweeping economic sanctions on Russia, and provided more than €100 billion in financial and military aid to Ukraine. This, combined with similar levels of support from the United States, has been crucial for Kyiv, helping Ukrainian forces hold their own on the battlefield.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen committed to do more on defence when campaigning for a second five-year term heading up the EU executive.
The German politician promised that one of the 26 commissioners who sit around her would be responsible for defence policy.
Initially there was some speculation that France and Poland were interested in their commissioner-nominees taking the defence brief. That talk died down, as they felt the role might end up being lightweight.
Behind the scenes von der Leyen was on the receiving end of a lot of lobbying to give the job to someone from the Baltic states. She settled on Lithuania’s nominee: Kubilius.
When he was preparing to take on the position, Kubilius got detailed briefings from senior commission officials working on defence policy.
During one of those first meetings, he asked a simple question of the EU officials sitting around the table. If Putin decides to invade an EU member state in the morning, what are we going to do? “I saw some real trouble in their eyes,” the 68-year-old recalled recently.
French president Emmanuel Macron has spent years arguing that Europe needs to be more responsible for its own security and reduce its dependence on the US. Capitals on the EU’s eastern flank have long cautioned the rest of the union about the threat posed by Putin.
After the invasion of Ukraine, EU states were in agreement that they needed to do more to guarantee their own defence. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has shortened the runway dramatically.
Now there is a feeling the US can no longer be relied upon to back up its traditional European allies, or Ukraine.
“Trump has kicked over the chessboard; we are in a completely new situation,” says Sabine Fisher, an eastern Europe expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “Europe has to ramp up its support for Ukraine, its military support for Ukraine and its own capabilities ... A lot is happening at the rhetorical level. At the level of actual deeds, we are lagging behind.”
The response of von der Leyen’s commission was a recent plan to “rearm Europe”, by making it easier for EU states to spend much more money on defence.
Cheap loans backed by the EU’s budget will be offered to capitals. Existing rules to keep national spending deficits in check will be relaxed. Unused development funding for poorer regions can be redirected to defence. EU states will also be encouraged to order military hardware and equipment in bulk together, to save money.
The commission’s White Paper on defence, which sets all this out, states while the EU remains a peace project, it has to be able to defend itself.
Speaking about the plan earlier this week, Kubilius said the 23-page document itself would not frighten Russia. “You cannot stop Putin by reading to him our White Paper,” he said.
The Russian leader would only be deterred from threatening Europe if he saw EU states were taking concrete steps to increase their military power, the commissioner said.
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Some early cracks have emerged in the EU consensus about how the huge increase in defence spending should be funded.
Italy’s hard right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni; Spain’s left-wing leader, Pedro Sánchez; and Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the centre-right Greek prime minister, have all kicked up.
The leaders of the southern EU states are pushing for the commission to offer grants, rather than loans, to finance increases in defence spending.
Although the commission’s loans would come at cheaper rates than many states could access on the market, the money would still have to be paid back.
Even accounting for proposed changes to budget rules, these countries fear adding to already burdensome levels of national debt. France has been struggling to rein in a huge spending deficit and will be unlikely to want to add another load of debt on to its balance sheet.
Grants would have to be funded by all 27 EU states jointly taking on common debt, something more fiscally “frugal” states, such as the Netherlands, fiercely oppose.
The EU is good at ‘getting its act together’ during a crisis. ‘There is emerging a sense of urgency ... It’s an existential threat to all of Europe
— Klara Lindström, an analyst with the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies
Speaking on his way into a summit of EU leaders last week, Sánchez said Spain was committed to spending more on defence, but had other pressures too. “We must consider that the challenges we face in the southern neighbourhood are a bit different from those in the east,” he said.
In Germany, the conservative leader Friedrich Merz, who is set to take over as chancellor, has torn up the fiscal rule book to push through big reforms of an institutional brake limiting state spending.
The changes will in effect give the next German coalition government a blank cheque to spend on defence.
Klara Lindström, an analyst with the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, says the EU has not done enough to brace itself for the shock of Trump upending the global world order.
However, past experience shows the union is good at “getting its act together” during a crisis, she says. “There is emerging a sense of urgency ... that the threat from Russia and its strategic long-term goals cannot be contained to Ukraine’s territory. It’s an existential threat to all of Europe.”
Geographical divisions are also obvious when it comes to how much military aid capitals send to Ukraine.
That was clear in the reaction to a recent plan tabled by the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas. It proposed EU states commit to matching the €20 billion in support they sent to Ukraine last year, and even go as far as doubling it this year.
Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister, was picked for the high-profile EU job largely because she is seen as hawkish on Russia. But her proposal failed to gather enough support among the 27 national leaders.
States’ contributions would have been calculated according to their economic weight. This is not a big problem for those to the east and the north, who are already spending sizeable chunks of their budget supporting Ukraine.
Lower proportional contributors, such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, France, would have had to considerably hike up the amount they put into the pot.
Many leaders did not like how the plan to potentially double the EU’s military support to Ukraine was sprung on states without much notice.
Still, getting more money and weapons to Ukraine has become a priority, given Trump could cut off future US support, if his effort to push Ukraine and Russia into a quick peace deal collapses.
Macron pledged to send a further €2 billion in military aid to Ukraine this week, when hosting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Paris. If US-led talks to end the war break down and a frustrated Trump turns off the tap of support to Ukraine, the EU will need to come up with much more than that.
