The meeting room in Brussels on Monday carried the familiar weight of institutional caution.
European foreign and defence ministers, gathered for a foreign affairs council session, gave their qualified backing to further development of a new protocol designed to coordinate responses to hybrid threats — sabotage, disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks and the like — while making one condition unmistakably clear: whatever Brussels builds must not replicate what NATO has already constructed. The message to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and the European Commission was straightforward, if diplomatically phrased. Get on with it, but do not duplicate.
“Many stress that it has to be absolutely complementarity with NATO,” Kallas told reporters after the meeting. “We don’t create anything additional, but this has to work hand in hand.” She was candid about the limits of what Monday’s session had achieved, acknowledging that it represented only a preliminary exchange and that she could not quantify how many of the bloc’s 27 member states had expressed support, since not all ministers had taken to the floor to offer their views. “Today was a very initial discussion, which means that we take this forward,” she said.
The protocol in question traces its origins to mid-September, when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first proposed what she called an “emergency security protocol” during her State of the European Union address. Von der Leyen framed it as “Europe’s own Article 4” — a reference to the NATO provision that obliges member countries to consult one another whenever an ally believes its territorial integrity, political independence or security is under threat. That consultation mechanism is itself the precursor to the more consequential Article 5, the collective defence clause under which an attack on one ally is treated as an attack on all.
The distinction Kallas drew between the two frameworks is substantively important. NATO’s Article 4, she pointed out, does not mandate any particular course of action — it is a consultative trigger, not an operational one. The EU’s proposed emergency protocol, by contrast, is intended to identify and deploy the specific tools available to member states in response to acts of aggression that fall below the threshold of armed conflict. Hybrid threats, almost by definition, occupy precisely that grey zone: hostile enough to destabilise, ambiguous enough to evade the trip-wires of conventional collective defence.
The protocol is expected to sit within the broader Security Strategy being developed jointly by Kallas and von der Leyen, with publication anticipated before the end of the year. Whether the final instrument will satisfy the sceptics — those who worry about institutional redundancy or about Brussels acquiring new levers of influence in the security domain — remains to be seen. The institutional architecture of European defence has long been shaped by a tension between ambition and restraint, and Monday’s discussion suggested that tension has not dissolved.
Alongside the hybrid threat discussion, ministers received a video briefing from Ukraine’s Defence Minister Evgeniy Khmara, who outlined the country’s frontline situation and reiterated that air defence remains Kyiv’s most urgent requirement. Kallas had entered the meeting signalling that member states might use the occasion to pledge Patriot interceptor missiles from their own stockpiles — a direct response to Ukraine’s acute vulnerability to Russian ballistic missile strikes. The Patriot system, American-made and globally scarce, has become one of the most contested assets in the war’s logistics. Supply constraints have been sharpened further by the conflict in Iran, which has drawn down American stocks considerably. Experts estimate it could take the United States approximately three years to restore advanced missile and interceptor inventories to pre-war levels.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has previously stated that Ukraine requires hundreds more interceptors to withstand the coming winter, and that the country is currently receiving only around one per cent of what it needs from Washington. The appeal to European allies to fill part of that gap has so far met resistance. Spain and Greece, both of which hold Patriot interceptors and have been lobbied by Brussels to transfer some to Kyiv, have declined on security grounds. Monday produced no change in that position. “On the interceptors, unfortunately, there were no new pledges made today,” Kallas confirmed.
For Ukraine, enduring another winter under Russian air bombardment with inadequate defences is not an abstraction — it is a question of survival for both its military capacity and its civilian infrastructure. The gap between what Kyiv says it needs and what European capitals are prepared to provide remains, for now, unbridged.