Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Northern Italy.

What was the purpose of the big leaders meeting in Sweden today?

Well, it was not entirely unique, but highly important meetings of the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries, and Poland. It's eight countries in total that came together on the leaders level in order to, first, of course, to say that we do support Ukraine and we are ready to do more, to say that we are ready to do more for defense. And these are countries, you should know, that they're all well above the 2% target of defense spending. Poland is above 4%, even. These are also the countries in the world that are the highest in terms of their proportion of GDP in terms of supporting Ukraine.