€70 Million — Gone Nowhere
Posted: 4th September 2026
Dear friends,
Today I read a story in Deutsche Welle, and one number has stayed with me ever since: €70 million.
Estonia paid that amount in advance to the Italian company Datasel S.R.L. for ammunition for Ukraine. According to Eesti Ekspress, cited by DW, the company had never sold a single artillery shell before. The deal collapsed into a scandal, the defence minister resigned — but resignation does not return €70 million.
What strikes me most is the contrast.
A small peace or human rights organisation can spend months trying to secure a €10,000 grant, explaining every receipt and every budget line. Yet somehow €70 million could be wired in advance in an arms deal like this.
And for me, the question goes beyond corruption or poor oversight. I also question why we have come to accept such enormous military spending as almost self-evidently necessary.
We keep hearing that security requires more weapons, more ammunition and ever larger military budgets. But why should the amount of money spent on weapons be treated as a measure of our security?
Seventy million euros can buy ammunition. But it can also equip hospitals, support schools, help thousands of families and refugees, fund diplomacy and peacebuilding, or prevent violence before it becomes war. These things create security too — and very often receive a tiny fraction of what governments are now prepared to spend on weapons.
So perhaps we should be asking two questions, not one: where is all this military money going — and why are we spending so much of our public money on militarisation in the first place?
Because €70 million is not just a number in a defence budget. It is our money, and every euro spent on weapons is a euro that cannot be spent somewhere else.
I would rather see much more of that money protecting and improving people’s lives than feeding an endless expansion of military budgets — and certainly not disappearing into strange arms deals.
Get the money back.