European leaders rarely tell the truth. So it was rather refreshing – albeit deeply alarming – when Belgium’s prime minister openly admitted what many EU citizens instinctively already knew.

“We have to finance Ukraine, and we’re incapable of delivering the military capacity to actually put an end to the conflict,” Bart De Wever said last week. “So we’re financing a war with no strategy… We don’t have the iron, so we give the gold. But to do what exactly? To keep that war going?”