Let us start with the facts. On 18 December 2025, at the European Council, the EU decided to guarantee Ukraine a loan of up to EUR 90 billion for the next two years, raised on the markets through joint borrowing and supported by the EU budget.

Ukraine will only have to repay it if, one day, Russia pays reparations; in the meantime, Russian assets remain tied up and the EU reserves the right to use the cash balances attached to those assets to finance or repay the loan.

Herein lies the first positive note, brutal in its simplicity: the goal was (and is) to prevent the heroic Ukrainian defence from being stifled by the cash register just as American support has become more intermittent and politically more costly.

The European loan buys time and predictability: two military resources before accounting.
It is not ‘solidarity’ in the sentimental sense: it is self-protection, because a Ukraine on its knees would make the continent poorer and more insecure.

The second positive note carries a name that, in recent years, Europe has often pronounced with irritation and rarely with gratitude: Germany.

The Merz government was pushing for a more direct use of immobilised Russian assets; faced with the stalemate and the risks concentrated mainly on Belgium, Berlin accepted the joint debt plan.
When history demands responsibility, Germany is there, showing moreover that it has cleansed itself (at least partially) of the Russian pollution that has conditioned it in recent decades.

And yet, within this turn of events in Brussels, there are three negative notes. And they are huge.

The first: European politics has preferred to make the next generation pay for the defence of Ukraine, not those responsible for the war.
True: the common debt is a step towards a political Europe. But it is also an elegant way of postponing the real issue: making the mafia regime in Moscow pay, here and now, with the wealth we have already locked up.

To understand why this postponement weighs, a non-technical aside is needed.
The ‘frozen Russian reserves‘ are mainly Russian central bank assets that had been invested in financial instruments in the West before 2022.
In the EU, there is talk of around EUR 210 billion frozen, with around EUR 185 billion in the Euroclear circuit in Brussels, the big hub that regulates payments and deliveries in the European bond market.
This is not ‘stolen’ money: it is immobilised money.
But between immobilising and repairing there is a political decision – and a legal framework – that is being postponed today, when it would be most useful.

The second negative note is the message to the world. To those who aim to carve up Europe like prey, we communicate that even the aggressor’s money under lock and key we struggle to use as leverage: legal fears, retaliation, internal divisions.
This is the most toxic effect of hybrid war: not so much changing our minds as making us doubt our ability to act.

The third is the most bitter because it concerns the meaning of history. The common debt issue could have been a ‘Hamilton moment’ for European unity: discovering, through shared risk, that there is a common European destiny.
The way we got there risks resembling a ‘Chamberlain moment’: buying time today, hoping that someone else will pay the real bill tomorrow.

A liberal does not ask for revenge. He asks for responsibility.
In democracies, mafia assets are confiscated not out of hatred, but to defend free society, compensate victims and make crime uneconomic.
A predatory regime works in the same way: as long as war has no patrimonial cost, it remains a rational option for those who decide on it.
The rule of law does not protect itself by protecting the aggressor’s wealth indefinitely; it protects itself by building, with rigour, the legal way to present him with the bill.

In short, on 18 December 2025 Europe took a step forward.
Now it must take another: transform prudence into architecture and law into deterrence.
Mutualising the cost of defence is necessary. Mutualising the courage to make those who started the war pay is even more so. Europe’s survival as a civilisation, not just as a Union, depends on it.