Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Kyiv for her second trip this year and used the visit to announce a new EU-Ukraine defence industrial partnership built around drones, missiles and the bloc’s military money. The deal will let drones be stored on EU soil before deployment to Ukraine, with funding drawn from the military strand of the €90 billion support loan and the roughly €10 billion still available under the SAFE defence programme.
Brussels Finds Its Favourite Battlefield
Von der Leyen arrived at Kyiv’s train station and declared, “The tide is turning.” She repeated the line beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, adding, “Russia may have darkened your skies with smoke. But no one is fooled. No cloud of smoke can hide the reality on the battlefield,” and, “Russia's momentum is weak. Ukraine, on the other hand, continues to resist.” The language is polished, the machinery behind it less so. The trip focused on unmanned aerial vehicles, with the first of its kind partnership designed to merge the bloc’s industrial scale with Kyiv’s “cutting-edge expertise” into joint ventures. Further down the line, the partnership intends to expand to missile technology.
The article says Ukraine has moved the fighting to the skies, launching long-range drone strikes against Russia’s oil refineries, some of them thousands of kilometres away from the contact line. That strategy has strained Moscow’s war chest and forced the energy-rich country to restrict fuel exports. Russia, meanwhile, is exploiting Ukraine’s severe shortage of US-made Patriot interceptors, which are essential to deflect ballistic missiles, to pummel cities at a relentless pace. Residential blocks, supermarkets, warehouses, railway stations, schools and museums have all been hit in recent weeks, and hundreds of civilians have been killed.
Von der Leyen was rushed to an underground shelter after an air raid alert was triggered. Euronews witnessed the intervention, which proceeded calmly and lasted but a few minutes. She later toured the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a historic monastery whose golden-domed cathedral was set on fire in June by a Russian attack. As she looked at the frescoes, she spotted areas still blackened by the flames. The visit offered the usual choreography of power: the shelter, the cameras, the ruined monument, the speech about resilience. The people under the bombs get the shelter. The institutions get the partnership.
The Accession Machine Keeps Rolling
The trip also reflected a renewed synchrony on Ukraine’s path to EU membership. In February, the Commission president had little to show for. The accession process was under the tight grip of Hungary’s veto, blocking any formal decision. Hope was virtually lost for as long as Viktor Orbán remained in office. Zelenskyy had then asked for full membership by 2027, saying, “It's true that we want a fast track for membership,” while von der Leyen replied, “I understand very well that for you, a clear date is also important. The date you set is your benchmark that you want to match. You know that from our side, dates by themselves are not possible, but of course, the support that you can reach your goal is absolutely clear on our side.”
This week, the accession story played to a vastly different tune. Von der Leyen arrived in Kyiv just a day after Ukraine opened a new cluster of negotiations, the second in one month. The breakthrough, made possible after the Hungarian elections in April, has laid a reasonable path to unblocking the remaining four clusters after the summer break. Zelenskyy has stopped talking about 2027 altogether. He said, “Our relationship with Europe is now the strongest, most meaningful and most personal than at any other point in our history.” Von der Leyen and her team privately welcomed what they saw as Zelenskyy’s improved understanding of enlargement as a step-by-step trajectory that can be politically sustainable only if its core rules are politically credible.
That’s Brussels language for discipline, not democracy. The accession process moves when the vetoes line up, the elections shift, and the institutions decide the timing. Ordinary people get told this is a historic path. What they actually get is a managed corridor of negotiations, defence contracts and military support loans, all wrapped in the language of European destiny.
Von der Leyen told Zelenskyy, “You are preparing for your future as a member state of our Union. But the truth is, your actions are already shaping the future of our entire continent.” The sentence lands like a brochure from the border regime’s headquarters. The continent is being shaped, all right — by war production, by accession bargaining, by the steady conversion of public money into military capacity, and by the same institutions that keep deciding who gets support, who gets vetoed, and who gets left to absorb the blast.