BRUSSELS — Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis insisted Thursday before an EU leaders’ summit that the bloc must play a bigger role in finding tens of billions of euros for countries to pay for increased military spending.

Mitsotakis said he would use the meeting in Brussels to call for the bloc to go further at an “inflection point where we realize we need to take more ownership over European defense” and support EU-wide borrowing for common projects.

Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has included recent violations of EU airspace by hostile drones and Russian fighter jets in recent months, has focused minds on collective security.

“My argument is very simple — if defense is the ultimate European public good, we need European structures and European funding to develop our defense capabilities,” Mitsotakis said in an interview with POLITICO.

“There is an elephant in the room. We don’t openly talk about it, but could we envision a scenario where we have a joint European borrowing facility that is targeted to support European defense projects?” he added.

“I would most certainly support that, provided there are projects that clearly qualify as European public good … let’s use European money to do things that we may not be able to do at the national level,” Mitsotakis said.

While the European Commission has brought forward a series of plans to loosen fiscal rules and allow capitals to borrow more to fund a large-scale rearmament program, countries have remained deadlocked on the idea of sharing the debt to unlock additional funds. A series of cross-border projects have been identified, including anti-drone measures, but it remains largely up to national governments to make the investments.

“I think the challenge is, can we have additional funding and can this additional funding be attached to conditionalities that push us in the direction of a stronger preparation,” Mitsotakis said, “which would be joint procurement, be the development of new technologies, especially drones and AI, and I think the Commission and European institutions have a clear role to play.”

According to a draft joint statement prepared by ambassadors from all 27 EU countries ahead of Thursday’s summit, the bloc will agree to “increasingly gear defense investment towards joint development, production, and procurement.”

Fiscally conservative countries such as the Netherlands have traditionally opposed new joint debt mechanisms to bolster spending capacity in other nations.

In the interview, Mitsotakis also delivered a warning on environmental priorities, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen faces a rebellion from countries that fear green policies and climate neutrality targets are harming their economies.

“I’ve been very, very clear — the green transition cannot be an end in itself,” said Mitsotakis. “Otherwise, we may realize at some point we are running in the wrong race. It needs to be balanced with competitiveness and it needs to foster, or at least not to hinder, social cohesion.”

“I hate to put a figure on it but the last 10, 15 or 20 percent of the green transition is, right now, frighteningly expensive and we don’t even have the technologies to actually drive that figure through,” he added.