BRUSSELS, November 3. /TASS/. The European Commission fears the EU may fail to meet the goals of its Readiness 2030 militarization strategy and is calling for greater military efforts, Brussels-based news outlet Rapporteur reported.

A draft of the Commission’s 2027 work program obtained by Rapporteur said the EU remains far from meeting its defense objectives despite unprecedented funding and political commitments.

The Commission therefore intends to urge EU countries to do even more to strengthen resilience, readiness and military capabilities to respond rapidly to a crisis or something worse.

The assessment echoes an earlier confidential European Defense Agency report identifying significant problems across all nine priority areas for developing EU military capabilities under the European Readiness 2030 program.

The EU currently treats 2030 as the deadline for preparing for a hypothetical non-nuclear conflict with Russia. This target was formally incorporated into EU military planning in March 2025 through the Readiness 2030 strategy, set out in the White Paper for European Defense - Readiness 2030. The same premise underpinned the NATO summit in The Hague in June that year.

In the preceding months, the EU and NATO conducted an extensive media campaign around claims, purportedly based on intelligence, that Russia would be ready to invade Europe in 2029 or 2030. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte repeated this assertion in almost every speech at the time, as did many other European officials and military leaders.