Italy Says No to NATO's Ukraine Arms Fund
Rome is opting out of PURL, SAFE, and NEC — three Western defense finance schemes — while promising NATO it will hit 5% of GDP.
By The Defense Desk
Italy has confirmed it will not fund the purchase of U.S. weapons destined for Ukraine, making it one of the few major NATO economies to refuse participation in the alliance's Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List — a pooled financing scheme that has so far drawn nearly $6 billion in pledges from member states [1].
Defense Minister Guido Crosetto delivered the clearest statement yet of Rome's position when he addressed parliament this week. "We have said no from the beginning, and it is still a no," he said, in reference to PURL [1].
PURL works by pooling national contributions to buy U.S.-manufactured weapons, which are then transferred to Ukraine. NATO says the scheme has helped fund 70% of all missiles for Ukraine's Patriot batteries and 90% of all ammunition used in other air defense systems [1]. Contributors already include Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden — Stockholm confirmed on Thursday it had committed $543 million [1].
Italy's refusal is not a single act of dissent but the visible tip of a much deeper strategic tension — one between the arithmetic of electoral politics and the geometry of collective defense.
The PURL decision sits inside a wider pattern of Italian opt-outs. Rome has indicated it will probably not subscribe to the EU's NEC scheme, which allows member states to exempt a portion of defense spending from annual deficit calculations to enable extra arms purchases without breaching EU fiscal rules [1]. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has also signaled Italy may not enter the EU's SAFE loans program, which would have made available €14.9 billion in cheap loans earmarked for defense spending [1].
Meloni's reasoning is explicitly domestic. She has warned that her government needs to focus on covering the cost of rising fuel bills. She is focusing a reelection campaign next year at a time when defense spending is falling out of favor with voters [1]. The fiscal argument, in other words, is also an electoral one.
That calculation places Italy in an awkward posture — publicly committed to NATO's most ambitious spending target in a generation while quietly declining the financial instruments designed to make that target reachable.
The gap between ambition and mechanism is wide. Italy has told NATO it will join alliance members in pushing defense spending to 5% of GDP — a composite figure made up of 3.5% in weaponry and 1.5% in domestic security spending [1]. Yet the path to that number runs partly through the very EU loan and exemption schemes Rome is now stepping back from.
The 5% pledge also raises questions about methodology. Last year, Italy announced it had increased defense spending from around 1.5% to 2% by recategorizing existing outlays — spending on Italy's tax police, coast guard, space programs, and cyber defense — as defense spending [1]. On June 11, Meloni said she would announce at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8 that Italy's defense spending would hit 2.8% of GDP this year, a rise she attributed to "growth of 0.71%, guaranteed above all by spending linked to homeland defense" [1].
Italian government sources confirmed to Defense News that the new spending covered border security, cyber, space, and dual-use technology — categories that would form part of the 1.5% extra envisaged by NATO's domestic security tier [1]. In other words, Rome's route to 5% runs heavily through civilian-adjacent infrastructure rather than conventional arms procurement.
This is the accounting question that haunts every headline-grabbing GDP commitment — whether the number reflects a genuine shift in military capability or a reclassification of what was already being spent.
Inside the Italian government, the picture is not entirely monolithic. Crosetto is known to be personally in favor of taking out SAFE loans, but he told parliament on Wednesday that the decision on entering the scheme rested with Italy's finance ministry. "The decision to adhere or not adhere to SAFE cannot be taken by the Ministry of Defense," he said [1]. Italian government sources added that discussions over using the loans were still ongoing [1].
That internal tension surfaced in diplomatic terms this week. On Monday, Crosetto flew to the U.S. to meet U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who posted after the meeting that they had agreed on the "urgent need for NATO allies to increase defense spending, expand defense industrial production, and field combat-credible military forces" [1]. On Thursday, Hegseth was in Brussels telling a meeting of NATO defense ministers that "Some of Nato's largest economies, some of our richest countries, allies that are happiest to go on about the rules-based international order and middle powers banding together, still seem to think the era of free-riding is here" — though he did not specify which countries he was referring to [1].
The subtext was legible to anyone in the room. Allied solidarity is measured not only in summit communiqués and GDP percentages, but in the specific, unglamorous choices about which programs to join and which checks to write.
Italy has chosen, at least for now, not to write the PURL check — and is hesitating on SAFE and NEC as well. Whether Rome's GDP commitments and its program abstentions can coexist without friction will be a central question when Meloni takes the stage at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8 [1].
Pledging 5% of GDP to NATO while declining the loans and schemes that would pay for it is a position that demands explanation — and Ankara will demand one.