Live updates: EU leaders back new military spending plans at Ukraine summit

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : He said EU support for Ukraine “signals to increase our production, and signals to a new program to increase European security.”
60% : “As we told President Trump, Ukraine is working and will work exclusively constructively for a quick and reliable peace.”
59% : (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert) Early Thursday morning, EU envoys finished drafting a summit statement for the leaders to endorse.
56% : Zelenskyy arrived at the emergency EU summit on Thursday and thanked European Union leaders for their unwavering support for Ukraine.
55% : EU leaders appear determined to adapt to the new security realities.
54% : The focus of the summit will be finances, and how to set the EU up as quickly as possible to provide for its own security, and help Ukraine, while breaking with decades of dependence on the U.S. defense umbrella.
53% : The leaders also took note of a commission offer of a loan package worth 150 billion euros ($162 billion) to buy new military equipment and invited EU headquarters staff “to examine this proposal as a matter of urgency.”
53% : The EU says it wants to back Ukraine with funds and military material so it can negotiate from a position of strength.
53% : Russia can demonstrate that it’s serious about peace, he said, by ceasing attacks on Ukraine’s energy and civilian infrastructure as well as halting military operations in the Black Sea, and it could also release prisoners of war.
52% : insists that funding for rearmament should not come at the expense of EU cohesion funds, but by redirecting unspent money from EU’s COVID-19 recovery fund toward the country’s defense industry.
51% : Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived for emergency talks with European Union leaders on Thursday in Brussels.
48% : European Union leaders on Thursday backed new defense spending plans aimed at freeing up billions of euros for the continent’s security after the Trump administration signaled that Europe would have to fend for itself in future.
48% : European Union leaders are holding the meeting to find ways to quickly increase their military budgets after the U.S. Trump administration signalled that Europe must take care of its own security and also suspended assistance to Ukraine.
47% : The 27 leaders signed off on a move to loosen budget restrictions so that willing EU countries can increase their military spending.
46% : At the same time, the 27-nation bloc was waking up to the news that French President Emmanuel Macron would confer with EU leaders about the possibility of using France’s nuclear deterrent to protect the continent from Russian threats.
41% : Volodymyr Zelenskyy received warm bonhomie from most leaders at the summit in Brussels — a stark contrast with the verbal lashing the Ukraine president got from Trump less than a week ago.
38% : European Union leaders have failed to reach a full consensus on a common stance in defense of Ukraine and its war against Russia.
31% : Over the last five years, European Union countries have been forced to adapt to unprecedented circumstances.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.