BAE Systems is quietly ramping up production of 155mm artillery shells at Glascoed in rural south Wales. Output will have increased 16-fold from 2022 levels by the end of this year.

Two months ago, the defence group opened a new factory in Sheffield making gun barrels for the M777 lightweight howitzer, to be supplied directly to Ukraine.

Poland is now producing a million bullets a day, up five times on pre-war levels. Annual output of Grot rifles will have risen six times to 100,000 by next year.

Germany’s Rheinmetall will soon be making 1.1 million howitzer shells a year, up from pre-war levels of 70,000. It is in talks to make armoured vehicles at Volkswagen’s surplus plant in Osnabrück. The weapons company is now worth more than VW, Munich or Deutsche Bank on the German bourse. A sign of the times.

Europe’s missile conglomerate, MBDA, is building a plant with Raytheon in Germany that will produce more American Patriot air defence missiles than America itself.

Production of the Franco-Italian SAMP/T – Europe’s answer to the Patriot – has risen fivefold compared to the original 2022 plan. The SAMP/T has largely closed the technology gap, lifting the range to 150 kilometres.

And about time, too, you might say. Europe should have rearmed after Russian President Vladimir Putin first attacked Ukraine in 2014. It should have put its economy on a war footing the moment he tried to take the whole country in 2022.

But rearmament is at last happening – minus the usual free-riders. The wheels were set in motion before US President Donald Trump returned to office. The pace is not warp speed but it is already changing the Atlantic balance of military power, and that is the larger story behind this week’s slapstick theatrics at the White House.

While Trump still commands the daily news cycle, he no longer commands the West and no longer commands the fate of Ukraine.

“With each month that passes, America is losing its strategic leverage,” said Professor Alan Riley from the Atlantic Council, a US think tank. “Trump cannot dictate terms to the Europeans or to Kyiv.”

While I think the European Union in its current structure is largely a nuisance, the great nation states of Europe still pack a punch. Europe as a whole has 33 million manufacturing jobs, while the United States has fewer than 13 million.

When push comes to shove, it is Europe that has the skills, factories and industrial infrastructure for massive military expansion. It is Europe that is becoming the new arsenal of democracy, though few yet realise it.

Who seriously thinks that a pledge by this president – verbal, legal or of any kind – has bankable value beyond a week?

Trump is certainly not in a position to force Ukraine to commit strategic suicide by giving up its unconquered “fortress belt” in the Donetsk oblast, the defensive line built up over 11 years that protects the towns of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka, as well as the military-industrial ecosystem close behind the front.

Putin failed to break the fortress belt in 2022 and has had no luck since despite colossal losses. The UK Ministry of Defence estimates that it would take him four more years to capture the whole oblast. The latest tactical penetration was a pre-Alaska publicity stunt by the Kremlin to fool Westerners into believing that Russia had unstoppable momentum. It did not move the military needle.

Handing over western Donetsk would open a gaping hole in the Ukrainian defences. It would be akin to the betrayal of democratic Czechoslovakia in 1938 when Britain and France coerced the Benes government into giving Hitler the Sudetenland and its 500-kilometre wall of fortified blockhouses. It denuded one of Europe’s best-armed nations at a stroke. “The parallels are acute,” said Riley.

If it is true that Trump blithely agreed to let Putin have the fortress belt – and reports in the Russian press suggest it may well be true – Europe is left with no choice. It cannot allow a strategic disaster of this magnitude to unfold on its doorstep. It must take full charge of the war and the peace – if there is any to be had – and in a sense, that is already what is happening.

Huge dangers lurk. Trump’s vague offer of a quasi-Article 5 guarantee for Ukraine sends shivers down my spine. Didn’t the US guarantee the sovereign integrity of Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994? Didn’t the last US president commit America’s full power and credibility to defend Ukraine “for as long as it takes”?

What does Trump mean when he says, “there’ll be a lot of help when it comes to security”? What are the exact contours of the disgraceful “land swap” that is supposed to underpin Trump’s deal?

Who seriously thinks that a pledge by this president – verbal, legal or of any kind – has bankable value beyond a week? We must assume that Trump will always drift back towards his pro-Putin sympathies.

Europe has the military and economic means to handle this colonial war alone without further contaminating interference from Washington, and can alone raise the cost of continued aggression to such exorbitant levels that Putin sues for peace on tolerable terms.

Contrary to assiduous Kremlin propaganda, Russia’s military-Keynesian economy cannot sustain the war against Ukraine indefinitely. Its banks are being forced to fund much of the military spending, disguising the scale of the budget shortfall and guaranteeing a future banking crisis. The liquid component of the national wealth fund has shrunk to $US48 billion ($74.4 billion), rendering it almost unusable.

Oil and gas revenues dropped to $US9.8 billion in July, down 28 per cent from a year ago. Brent crude has fallen to $US66 and is at the bottom of its three-year trading range. It is even more devalued in real terms. Urals Novorossiysk crude is trading at a further discount of $US12 a barrel. Hard-nosed Asian buyers know that Russia is a distressed seller.

It is Europe that is becoming the new arsenal of democracy, though few yet realise it.

The International Energy Agency says global oil markets face a record glut next year. Analysts are starting to talk of $US40 unless the world economy rebounds soon.

Europe and Britain have unilaterally tightened their squeeze on Russia’s shadow fleet and the financial logistics that make this trade possible. India is no longer able to operate so easily as a giant refining hub for Russian oil, some of it re-exported back to Europe. Data from Kpler showed that Russian shipments to India have collapsed to 400,000 barrels a day so far in August from a monthly pace of 1.8 million before the new curbs.

America is not the critical enforcer any more. Trump’s tough talk on oil sanctions has been empty, without credibility, and irrelevant.

It would be a crime against statecraft for Europe to allow itself to be bounced into ratifying Russia’s military conquest at this juncture. American weapons are still needed, and Trump was chortling this over Europe’s offer to buy another $US100 billion worth, but even that is becoming less clear.

The Sparta Project by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) spells out how Europe can handle the Russian threat entirely on its own. The immediate task is to stop any of Ukraine’s 100 fighting brigades and its defence nexus from falling into Putin’s hands. The Ukrainian army is now the most valuable asset in free Europe.

The project says Germany and Europe should seek “asymmetric superiority” by building a drone wall and an army of battlefield robots on NATO’s eastern flank, which can be done quickly and at a fraction of the cost of trying to compete on tanks.

The Europeans can break dependency on Elon Musk’s Starlink by expanding the satellite capability of Eutelsat’s London-based OneWeb, if buttressed by the medium-orbit constellation of SES. And so on.

“It is absolutely imperative that we free ourselves of dependence on US systems as far and as quickly as possible,” said Tom Enders, the former Airbus chief and now president of the DGAP.

The Sparta Project is shaping Germany’s €500 billion ($902 billion) blitz of national rearmament. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is aiming for an annual defence budget of €162 billion by the late 2020s. It was just €67 billion three years ago.

Putin, too, can see what is happening and this takes us into perilous waters. The Kremlin has a short window to intimidate the Europeans before they have fully rearmed and while there is still a vain, vacillating and gullible president in the White House.

It is why there is so much urgent talk behind the scenes in Europe for a co-ordinated Franco-British nuclear deterrent that spans the escalation ladder from tactical nuclear shells to strategic missiles.

For all the well-rehearsed bonhomie and talk of peace in Washington this week, we are nearing the moment of maximum danger.

Telegraph, London

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