"We have allowed all those production facilities to be closed down after the end of the cold war. It costs money to persuade companies to keep production lines in reserve. We just didn't pay the money. That was part of the peace dividend. And with hindsight it looks like a mistake. It is obvious that Europe is lagging behind, and the EU's defence and technological and industrial base suffers from years of underinvestment."
He admitted European defence manufacturers still did not feel that the process of rearmament was permanent, and said Vladimir Putin was spending 40% of GDP on defence and would eventually bankrupt his country by making the military so resource hungry. Russia has 3.5 million people in the military industrial complex. By contrast, "Europe didn't just disarm, it deindustrialised in the defence field," Sikorski said.
"Companies were telling me, 'We read in the newspapers that there is all this demand for armaments but we are not getting the long-term contracts. And if we don't have a 10-year contract, we are responsible to our shareholders. We can't make the investments.' So it's about guaranteeing them that this is not just for tomorrow, but this is a long-term rearmament and change in security."
He said Europe had to learn to play the escalation game better by keeping Putin guessing about its intentions. Asked whether it was permissible for Ukraine to strike military targets inside Russia, he said: "The Russians are hitting the Ukrainian's electricity grid and their grain terminals and gas storage capacity, civilian infrastructure. The Russian operation is conducted from the HQ at Rostov-on-Don. Apart from not using nuclear weapons, Russia does not limit itself much."
More broadly, he argued: "Always declaring what our own red line is only invites Moscow to tailor its hostile actions to our constantly changing self-imposed limitations."
He was sceptical about Russian threats to use nuclear weapons, saying: "The Americans have told the Russians that if you explode a nuke, even if it doesn't kill anybody, we will hit all your targets [positions] in Ukraine with conventional weapons, we'll destroy all of them.
"I think that's a credible threat. Also, the Chinese and the Indians have read Russia the riot act. And it's no child's play because if that taboo were also to be breached, like the taboo of not changing borders by force, China knows that Japan and Korea would go nuclear, and presumably they don't want that."
Polish Foreign Minister Calls For Long-Term Rearmament of Europe | Poland | The Guardian
