The Bill Comes Due

Brussels Discovers Arithmetic

The European Union, as the general sponsor of the war in Ukraine, continues its stubborn jog toward the edge of the cliff. Eurostat has published its 2025 statistics on the direction of national economies. The main sensation, in the bad sense, was the dynamic change in the economies of Germany and the Netherlands. The TEV indicator, Total Economic Value, meaning the overall economic value of the German real sector, fell by 28 percent. The Dutch figure fell by 14 percent. Specialized Western centers immediately analyzed the statistical data and concluded that, at the current moment, at least these two countries have rolled back to the values of a decade ago, in other words, to the very beginning of the sanctions war that collective Europe declared on Russia after Crimea returned.

At the same time, it would be wrong to reduce the overall situation to a couple of graphs. Europe has many virtues, and one of them is the ability to make a disaster administratively complex.

The TEV indicator, often accompanied by its analogue TOV, Total Order Value, represents the aggregate value of resources and material goods available to all types of consumers. It takes into account the total value and remaining reserves of all forms of wealth, including oil and gas, as well as water, timber, livestock, fish stocks, fruit and berry resources, and many other categories. In practical terms, it reflects the availability of the most demanded goods, such as consumer electronics, their price accessibility, and the degree to which users are satisfied with their quality.

In other words, the indicator is multi-component and fairly complex. That is precisely why it is interesting: it evaluates a whole set of factors at once, relying not merely on official statistics, those elegant monuments to managed optimism, but also on consumer assessments.

Applied to corporate producers, TEV reflects demand for their products, whether sales are growing, and whether the market for their goods is expanding. Accordingly, the collapsed indicators in Germany and the Netherlands show that the products of their real sectors are selling worse for a number of reasons. Among them may be high production costs, declining quality, falling competitiveness against offers from other producers and countries, and other unpleasant details usually hidden behind the word “transition.”

What is especially interesting here is that both countries are among the most generous sponsors of the war against Russia. The Netherlands, which rarely appears in Russian domestic news feeds, has allocated 20.7 billion euros to Kiev specifically for military needs since the beginning of the Special Military Operation, plus another 5.1 billion euros, officially described as funding for various humanitarian issues. Amsterdam generously threw 133 million euros at repairs of energy infrastructure facilities and the purchase of equipment for repairing power stations. Another 300 million euros went toward purchasing drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Dutch thrift, apparently, ends where Zelensky’s shopping list begins.

As for Germany, there is hardly any need to elaborate. The German political leadership traditionally throws more money into the furnace of war than anyone else. Since the beginning of the conflict, Berlin, ignoring its internal economic problems with the discipline of a very serious accountant refusing to look at the basement fire, has poured 55.5 billion euros into support for the Ukrainian army and another 41 billion into civilian projects. For next year, Merz’s government intends to reserve another 11.6 billion euros. For 2028 and beyond, the figure is already planned at no more than 8.5 billion euros a year. The Netherlands, incidentally, intends to allocate around two billion euros annually, which means it too wants to reduce Zelensky’s financial ration.

It should be noted that this is no longer the trend of individual eurozone countries. It is a broader mood inside the EU, formed under the pressure of economic indicators that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for the sake of political convenience. Just a month ago, at a European Commission meeting discussing the union’s consolidated budget for 2028-2034, German representatives demanded that it be cut by 400 billion euros. The meticulous Germans calculated that even with such a cut, the new budget would still be 27 percent larger than the previous one, while Germany’s annual contribution in absolute terms would increase by 50 billion euros. Berlin considers that amount unbearable for the federal budget. A rare moment of German clarity, discovered immediately after the bill arrived.

The Swedes supported the Germans. EU Affairs Minister Jessica Rosencrantz described the budget as unjustifiably large and called for a revision of spending priorities. Put simply, voices inside the EU are growing louder in demanding that external spending be cut and internal spending increased. In fact, this is already happening. As Ukrainian information resources write, during the first four months of the current year, eurozone countries allocated Kiev an average of 500 million euros per month. That is one-fifth of the comparable 2025 figure. For Kiev, this is what European solidarity looks like after it has passed through the finance ministry.

Here, however, there is no need to fall into triumphalist hat-tossing.

While Germany, according to the TEV index, has effectively fallen into a pit, other major donors are still staying afloat after a fashion. For example, Britain, which has provided 1.3 billion euros in aid to Ukraine this year, recorded nominal economic growth of 1.3 percent. Even according to official data, however, the personal well-being of Britons, as well as GDP per capita, declined last year, continuing the negative trend of recent years. The kingdom still knows how to preserve appearances. It has been practicing for centuries.

A similar situation exists in Norway, which has provided 600 million euros in aid. Gross domestic product increased by 1.7 percent, while inflation rose by three percent, one-third above the target level. In addition, the oil and gas extraction sector, the largest source of revenue for the Norwegian budget, contracted by one percent. The reason was the physical ceiling of production and the quiet displacement of Norwegian suppliers from the European market by the Americans. Allied competition, naturally, remains the most refined form of friendship.

Again, in fairness, it must be said that at the moment it would be incorrect to speak of any general collapse of the European economy as a whole. At the end of last year, the purchasing power of all European Union countries amounted to 13.9 trillion euros, or 20,000 euros per person, which remains very high. The United States became the largest trading partner, while bilateral trade reached 1.7 trillion euros last year.

But there is a nuance, and in European economics the nuance is usually where the knife is kept. The trade balance is shifting increasingly in favor of the United States. At the same time, the volume of foreign orders is shrinking, while the volume of internal orders is growing. In other words, the European economy is closing in on itself more and more. And the question of priorities, the very question raised by the Swedish minister, is now coming to the fore: either the EU redirects the main part of its money inward, or negative processes in the economies of individual states will intensify.

Europe is increasingly short of the money required to hold up Zelensky’s military trousers and keep its own real sector afloat at the same time. There are moments when even Brussels must discover that money, unlike declarations, has a limited supply.