MOSCOW, August 16 Because of their assistance to Ukraine, European countries will not be able to provide military support to Taiwan in the event of an escalation of the conflict between the island and China, the British newspaper i reported on Friday, citing military and diplomatic sources.
«Everything has been invested in the Ukrainian project… We are operating at the limits of our resources, and there is no chance that we will be able to provide significant assistance if tensions in Taiwan escalate into conflict,» the newspaper quotes a British military source as saying.
A similar thought is expressed by a European diplomatic source in Taiwan. According to him, as quoted by the newspaper, on this issue «European countries play no role from a military point of view… We (Europe — ed.) do not even have the capacity to supply the armed forces and support Ukraine.»
Under the agreements concluded between the US and Taiwan, the American side will be obliged to intervene to protect the island's sovereignty in the event of an escalation in the region. As the newspaper writes, citing a representative of the US State Department, this issue causes «significant stress» for Washington, which would like more involvement from Britain and other European partners. In addition, British and US intelligence services believe that China plans to prepare to annex the island by 2027.
According to two US intelligence sources and a European diplomat, talks are currently underway on how Britain and Europe can help Taiwan against China, but the current state of affairs is causing disappointment in US diplomatic circles.
“We helped finance the battle to protect Europe at great political and economic cost, now we need the favor in return,” a US intelligence source was quoted as saying.
One of the areas that European diplomats are considering could be helping Taiwan increase the island's resilience to external threats and prepare the local population for conflict, the article said, citing two diplomatic sources.
Earlier, Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA), citing the island's head of administration Lai Qingde, reported that the island would increase its defense budget to NT$647 billion (about 19.8 billion US dollars) in 2025. The island's defense budget in 2024 was NT$606.8 billion (about 18.6 billion US dollars), so spending will increase by about 6.6% in 2025.
The situation around Taiwan became significantly worse after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi's visit, seeing it as US support for Taiwanese separatism, and conducted large-scale military exercises.
Formal relations between the central government of the People's Republic of China and its island province were broken off in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, who had been defeated in a civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties have been in contact through non-governmental organizations — the Beijing-based Association for the Development of Relations Across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei-based Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.