The Effect of Russia’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine on European Defence Procurement Evidence from Arms Transfer Data

Sammanfattning

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led European countries to increase defence spending sharply and reignited debate over Europe's dependence on American suppliers. Colom-Piella (2026) shows that Spain, a non-frontline country, responded by buying more through existing suppliers rather than switching, a pattern he calls ‘accelerated continuity’. We ask whether countries closer to Russia behaved differently at the point of procurement decision, using a difference-in-differences design on SIPRI arms transfer data with both a binary frontline indicator and a continuous threat index. We show that the timing convention is decisive: indexing by delivery year produces a large apparent decline in the European supplier share (−0.385***) that is a measurement artefact, while indexing by order year, the moment of decision, leaves no significant differential change for frontline countries after 2022 (European share +0.014, ns; no detectable shift toward American suppliers). The real compositional divergence between frontline and non-frontline countries originates in the 2014 Crimea annexation (−0.227*** for 2014–2021), not 2022. Frontline countries, like Spain, accelerated procurement through existing channels rather than reorienting toward new suppliers. To our knowledge this is among the first cross-country empirical studies of how threat proximity shaped arms-import composition in Europe after 2022.