Daily Times

Stockholm: Europe saw the world’s biggest rise in arms imports in the past five years, a trend set to accelerate following recent rearmament commitments amid the threat posed by Russia, researchers said Monday.

While arms exports declined globally by 4.6 percent in 2017-2021 compared to the preceding five years, Europe posted a 19-percent increase, according to a study published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

“Europe is the new hotspot”, Siemon Wezeman, co-author of the annual report for over three decades, told AFP.

“We are going to increase our military spending not just by a little bit but by a lot. We need new weapons and a lot of that will come from imports”, the senior researcher said, adding that the majority was likely to come from other European countries and the US.

Germany in particular has already announced plans to up its military spending, as have Denmark and Sweden.

European countries spooked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are expected to beef up their militaries with fighter jets, such as the American F-35, missiles, artillery, and other heavy weapons.

“Most of these things take a bit of time. You have to go through the process, you have to decide, you have to order, you have to produce. This generally takes a couple of years at least”, Wezeman said.

He said the upward trend actually started after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, with the effects visible now.

Europe’s share of the global arms trade has already risen from 10 to 13 percent in the past five years, and this share will increase “substantially”, according to Wezeman.

The opaque nature of many contracts and donations of weapons without payment make it difficult to provide an exact figure for the world arms trade but experts estimate turnover at close to $100 billion (91 billion euros) annually.