The Italian government has remained adamant on the issue of financing the purchase of American weapons for Ukraine under the PURL scheme. Back in December 2025, Rome rejected this initiative, arguing that a ceasefire would soon be achieved. But even after six months of active war actions, the Italian government has not joined in supporting Ukraine under this mechanism.
This was officially announced by the Italian Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto during a speech in Italian parliament. He also emphasized that Rome's position was announced from the very beginning.
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This statement actually coincided with the holding of a meeting in the Rammstein format, at which Ukraine's partners declared to contribute almost $ 1 billion to the PURL initiative. At the same time, in addition to European countries, for which support for Ukraine is a matter of their own security, Australia contributed $ 100 million to PURL.
The reasons for Rome's decision not to participate in PURL may be far from just official explanations. In particular, it is worth recalling the cooling of relations between Italy and the United States, which was especially aggravated during the war with Iran, when the Italians even turned away American aircraft, not allowing them to land.
In addition, it should be mentioned that the Italian government is trying to avoid increasing defense spending as much as possible. The latter was noted by Defense News, noting that the Italian government continues to reject any mechanisms designed to increase defense capabilities. Rome has not yet used the NEC scheme, which allows EU states to exempt a quantity of defense spending from calculations of annual deficit spending in order to allow extra arms purchases without breaking EU deficit rules.
The Italian government also did not participate in the SAFE mechanism for providing long-term loans for the purchase of weapons. But the publication notes that the discussion on it is ongoing. Finally, from the side of Defense Express, we note that the Italian Ministry of Defense has planned a fairly large-scale modernization of country’s Ground Forces with the transition to combat vehicles by Rheinmetall, including a plan to purchase more than 1,000 Lynx infantry fighting vehicles. Given this, cheap SAFE loan money should be quite attractive to the Italian government but...
At the same time, the key reason may be the Italian government's reluctance to increase defense spending, which, upon closer inspection, still remains less than 1.5% of GDP. Recall that Italy in 2025 showed how 1.5% of GDP on defense can easily be counted as 2%. To do this, it is enough to include in the category of defense spending the spending on the Carabinieri, the tax police, space and cyber defense.
According to the publication, despite the statement of the head of the Italian government, Giorgia Meloni, that in 2026 the country will show defense spending at the level of 2.8%, this will be achieved in a similar way – by including other unrelated budget lines in the category of defense spending. As Defense News writes its Italian government sources told that the new spending announced by Meloni would cover border security, cyber, space and dual-use technology and would form part of the 1.5% extra envisaged by NATO.
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