Signal No. 88 · A union around the veto
INTDPLDIN Kubilius tells the EU to bring Ukraine's military into a defence union — and readies a market-integration plan for next week
Reuters, 23 Jun · European Pravda, 18 Jun · Euronews, 29 Apr · Großwald — Signal No. 86
Andrius Kubilius, the European Commissioner for Defence and Space, told the European Defence and Security Summit in Brussels on Tuesday that the EU should integrate Ukraine's armed forces into a future European defence union, calling it a matter of self-interest rather than charity. "Thanks to transformation of its war doctrine, Ukraine is prevailing," he said. "It would be difficult to understand if we in Europe would not take it as our vital interest to integrate the military force of Ukraine into our European defence architecture." The framing inverts the question that has run for three years: how much weaponry and money Europe should send east.
The idea is not new, and the design is deliberate: Kubilius wants the union built not by amending the EU treaties but on a separate intergovernmental pact. It would open beyond the bloc — to Britain, Norway and Ukraine, which would join without waiting for EU or NATO membership. It is also contested. The Estonian member of the European Parliament Riho Terras asks "who will be the chief of defence of Europe?" and argues the money is better spent on production than on a parallel structure.
Kubilius paired the ambition with a legislative timetable. The Commission will "likely" present its first proposals for further integration of the European defence market the following week, he said, "with detailed analysis and follow-up steps." "Later this year," he added, it will table a proposal to change defence procurement rules "and other market rules." That is the concrete half of the speech. Europe's defence market remains 27 national procurement regimes buying overlapping kit on separate timelines; the SAFE instrument — Security Action for Europe, the EUR 150 billion loan facility the Council adopted last year — and the Commission's "Made in Europe" preference are first attempts to force consolidation. A rewrite of procurement law is the mechanism that would make those preferences bite.
Signal › Two things are being proposed at once, and they travel at different speeds. The defence union — Ukraine's army as a constituent part of European defence rather than a client of it — rests on a real asymmetry: Ukraine's forces are larger and more combat-tested than any in the EU, and the doctrine Europe is now scrambling to buy — cheap drones in mass, deep strike, fast iteration — is the one Ukraine has proven in this war. Kyiv has already begun acting the part — opening its catalogue of captured Russian hardware to vetted allied militaries last week, as Signal No. 86 reported. But a commissioner can sketch an architecture, not sign it. Routing the union outside the EU treaties is meant to dodge the national vetoes; it still needs governments willing to bind themselves by a new treaty, and still leaves unanswered who guarantees Ukraine's security. The market-integration paper due next week, and the procurement-rule rewrite promised this year, are the parts a commissioner can actually move.
AIRAIDIN France orders 5,000 reconnaissance drones from Harmattan AI, its first defence unicorn, on a fast-track contract
Reuters, 23 Jun · DGA, 23 Jun · Zone Militaire, 23 Jun
France's armament directorate, the Direction générale de l'armement (DGA), ordered 5,000 DELCO soldier-reconnaissance drones from the French start-up Harmattan AI, the armed forces ministry said on Tuesday — one of the country's largest single buys of small drones. The aircraft are to reach the army no later than early 2027 and follow an initial 1,000 delivered in January 2026 and used at the Orion 2026 exercise. The DELCO is a light surveillance machine — about 1.8 kilograms, roughly two kilometres of range, 40 minutes aloft, with day-and-night optics from the French infrared specialist Lynred — assembled in France. Harmattan AI, founded in 2024 with Dassault Aviation among its backers, is France's first defence "unicorn," a start-up valued above USD 1 billion. The ministry said the purchase came through "a simplified requirements process stemming from discussions between the State and industry."
Signal › The number is mass at the bottom of the stack — cheap eyes, bought by the thousand. The method matters more: a two-year-old company as prime contractor, a deliberately simplified requirements process, and a delivery clock measured in months. France is bending its procurement to the tempo the war set, because attritable volume has become a standing line item rather than a one-off. The DELCO is a reconnaissance drone, so this is mass in the sensing layer rather than the strike one; even so, it shows a sovereign drone base can be stood up at start-up speed when the state is willing to buy that way.
RUCENS Russia's fuel crisis spreads to Siberia as Moscow weighs a diesel-export ban and fuel imports
Reuters, 23 Jun · Reuters, 23 Jun · Reuters, 23 Jun · Reuters, 23 Jun · TASS, 23 Jun · Großwald — Signal No. 87
Fuel rationing that began in occupied Crimea has spread across Russia and reached Siberia. Governors in Novosibirsk and Omsk — more than 2,000 kilometres from the front — announced or prepared sales limits this week, joining a list that now runs through central Russia, the Volga and the Far East. Omsk capped petrol at 40 litres a car. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Tuesday that Moscow was considering a ban on diesel exports and tax changes to steady the home market, while the newspaper Vedomosti reported that importing fuel had been raised as an option at a meeting he chaired. Sevastopol, home to the Black Sea Fleet, restricted public transport, shops, cafés and street lighting and banned mass outdoor events; Crimea suspended tourist activities and children's summer camps until September. Russian industry sources put gasoline output about 25 percent below its June-2025 daily average, with seaborne product exports down some 15 percent in the first half of June. Ukraine's UN envoy, Andrii Melnyk, said roughly 40 percent of Russia's refineries had been damaged. President Vladimir Putin, in his first public comment on the campaign, said the strikes on infrastructure were meant "to destabilise society," and ordered the government and Defence Ministry to minimise the damage.
Signal › The deep-strike campaign Großwald tracked in Signal No. 87 has crossed from burning refineries to bending the home market of the world's third-largest oil producer — a state that normally exports diesel now studying how to import fuel. That is the strategic effect Kyiv said it was after: not headline fires but systemic fuel insecurity reaching the Russian interior. The open question is durability — whether rationing outlasts the summer driving and harvest peak, or hardens as strikes outpace repair. A diesel-export ban would ease the shortage only by surrendering the export revenue the refinery strikes were meant to choke — Moscow choosing which pain to take.
DIPRUCINT Russia blames Britain and France for Washington's harder line — and rules out any European mediator in the war
Financial Times, 23 Jun · Reuters, 23 Jun · Reuters, 23 Jun · TASS, 23 Jun
In three days, three senior Russian officials accused Washington of drifting from the "understandings" Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump reached at their Alaska summit last August. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said on Sunday that only one side had kept to them. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that all hope of the United States as an "honest mediator" had "collapsed long ago." His deputy Sergei Ryabkov struck a more careful note at Moscow's Primakov Readings forum. Russia had seen "signs of a shift in the US position away from the understandings reached in Anchorage," he said, but insisted "the dialogue with the Americans continues." Moscow still "adhere[s]" to the Putin–Trump line, he added, and "appreciate[s]" Trump's efforts toward a settlement. Ryabkov placed Washington's drift "closer to the most rabid anti-Russian policies" of the UK and France, and called the conduct of the two nuclear-armed allies "deeply destructive" and "dangerous for European security." Western reporting frames the same days the other way: at last week's G7 in Évian, Trump agreed to tighten energy sanctions and was reported "impressed" by Ukraine's deep strikes, which US intelligence still guides.
Signal › Washington's role as mediator is fraying — but not toward a European one. Moscow's own signals split: Lavrov calls the US channel all but dead; Ryabkov says the dialogue is alive and still values Trump's efforts. Both, though, want Washington re-engaged, and both reject a European broker. Trump, scolded by Moscow as too pro-Kyiv, is meanwhile the one tightening sanctions and feeding the intelligence behind Ukraine's strikes. The talks have sat frozen since February, and nothing this week moves them. What is left is a war all three want to steer and none can: no broker either side will accept, and no tidy story about who is stepping in or out.
AIRAIDIN Leonardo and Baykar fly the first live trials of their K-SWARM crewed-uncrewed teaming programme
Italy's Leonardo and Türkiye's Baykar announced on 22 June the first live flight trials under K-SWARM, their crewed-uncrewed teaming programme — manned-unmanned teaming, in the doctrine's own term. The trials, flown in May at Baykar's flight-test centre at Çorlu in Türkiye, moved the effort from the simulator to live flight. A Leonardo M-346 Fighter Attack jet, acting as the command platform, directed a Bayraktar KIZILELMA uncrewed combat aircraft through position changes, separations and rejoins, with an Italian Air Force T-346A flying chase to monitor the mission and gather data. The companies said the KIZILELMA responded accurately to the M-346's commands and that further, more complex trials would follow.
Signal › Europe's two flagship next-generation fighter efforts take the headlines — the Franco-German Future Combat Air System (FCAS) now dead, the rival Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) courting new partners — but the loyal-wingman teaming both promise for the late 2030s is already being flown by an Italian-Turkish pair, on a trainer-derived jet and an existing combat drone. The near-term teaming capability may not come from the exquisite sixth-generation programmes at all; it may come from whoever first pairs cheap autonomy with an aircraft already in service. For Leonardo it doubles as a hedge — a position in collaborative combat air that does not wait on GCAP's timeline or its partner politics.
ARCAIRRUC Russian Tu-160 bombers fly a 16-hour, air-refuelled patrol over the Barents and Norwegian seas
Russia's defence ministry said its nuclear-capable Tu-160 strategic bombers flew a 16-hour mission over the international waters of the Barents and Norwegian seas on Tuesday, including an air-to-air refuelling test, with MiG-31 fighters alongside. It called the flight routine and said unidentified foreign jets escorted the bombers "at certain points"; Russia borders the NATO members Norway and Finland along that flank.
Signal › These Tu-160 patrols are routine, and the NATO intercepts that meet them are too. The air-to-air refuelling is the part to note: it rehearses the extended reach that turns a patrol into a strike option, flown days after Russia sharpened its language toward Europe's two nuclear powers.
Procurement · Industry · Capability
DINAI Berlin drone-maker Stark raises EUR 500 million, tripling its value to more than EUR 3.5 billion
Stark Defence, the Berlin loitering-munition start-up founded in 2024, raised EUR 500 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, with Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund and Döpfner Capital alongside. The round roughly triples its valuation to more than EUR 3.5 billion and lifts total funding since founding to about EUR 640 million, most of it bound for research and production. Stark holds a EUR 270 million Bundeswehr contract, won this spring beside Helsing and Rheinmetall, supplying Virtus strike drones that range beyond 130 kilometres. This is the private-capital half of European rearmament: venture money floods drone production while states take equity in the primes. Helsing is said to be raising USD 1.2 billion at a USD 18 billion valuation, and Quantum Systems is readying a round before a 2027 listing — with one lead backer already casting Stark as a future consolidator of a fragmented field.
GRDDIN KNDS hands Sweden the first of 110 modernised Leopard 2s, with a longer gun
KNDS Deutschland handed Sweden's procurement agency FMV the first of 110 comprehensively modernised Stridsvagn 123 A tanks — the Swedish Leopard 2 — at a handover ceremony in Munich. The REMO programme covers Sweden's entire Leopard 2 fleet and runs to 2030, adding a new L55 A1 gun that KNDS says lifts range and firepower, fully digital crew workstations, more protection and a logistics package. It keeps Sweden's heavy armour on the German Leopard line, even as KNDS's owners settle the Franco-German ownership-parity deal struck on Monday.
GRDDIN Berlin orders 23 Rheinmetall recovery vehicles to backfill armour sent to Ukraine
The Bundeswehr ordered 23 Rheinmetall Bergepanzer 3 armoured recovery vehicles — the modernised, obsolescence-cleared Bergepanzer 3 A2 — in the mid-three-digit-million-euro range, following a budget-committee decision on 10 June. The order replaces 23 recovery vehicles (21 Bergepanzer 2 and two Bergepanzer 3) handed to Ukraine, with first delivery in December 2027 and the last in June 2029. Rheinmetall says it pre-financed and began production ahead of signature to bring the first vehicle in just 18 months. Recovery-and-tow vehicles drag damaged tanks off the battlefield under fire — an unglamorous enabler whose donated stock Germany is now rebuilding, and a small instance of the backfill problem that runs under every transfer to Kyiv.
Week Ahead
Wednesday 24 June: The Bundestag's budget committee rules on Berlin's 40 percent KNDS purchase at its last sitting before recess — the gate to the July listing, and the falsifier on yesterday's lead. KNDS is expected to file its intention to float the same day.
Next week: The European Commission's first proposals to integrate the European defence market are due, per Kubilius — the concrete follow-through on today's lead. A rewrite of defence procurement rules is promised later this year.
Thursday 25 June: The Ukraine Recovery Conference opens in Gdańsk. President Volodymyr Zelensky will skip it, sending Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, to insulate the forum from a deepening rift with Poland after President Karol Nawrocki stripped him of Poland's highest honour. Warsaw says some 200 agreements are prepared, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) plans to sign more than EUR 500 million in Ukrainian energy and banking deals. Around the same date, Ukraine's one-week ultimatum to Belarus expires.
By 30 June: Poland and Sweden aim to close terms on the Orka submarine (Saab A26); GCAP's Edgewing design contract reaches a funding boundary, with Italy's defence minister Guido Crosetto now naming Canada as the likeliest new partner, an observer; and the EU's first disbursement from the EUR 90 billion 2026-27 loan to Ukraine is due.
Postponed: The EU-UK reset summit, set for 22 July, has been shelved by European Council President António Costa pending Britain's leadership transition after Keir Starmer's resignation — leaving London's bid to join "Made in Europe" defence procurement and the SAFE loan instrument waiting on the next government.
7-8 July: NATO leaders meet in Ankara, with the path to higher defence spending the headline deliverable, and the Czech government's move to bar President Petr Pavel from its delegation an early sign of the strain.
