Babiš again offered Europe a "Euro Patriot." A day earlier, Brussels announced cooperation on FREYJA, a project of the coalition Czechia did not join in July

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, at the Prague Defense Summit on Thursday, September 17, proposed a joint European missile defense program he called Euro Patriot, and said that no concrete progress is visible in Europe in this area. The day before, however, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU wants to develop a missile defense system with Ukraine, and that cooperation is centered around the FREYJA project. This is supported by a coalition of nine European states and Ukraine, formed on July 13 in Paris. Babiš brought his idea, modeled on Airbus, to that meeting as well, but Czechia was not among the coalition's founders. ČT24 ↗ Európska komisia ↗ Novinky ↗

What Babiš proposed in Prague

According to Babiš, Europe should join forces the way it did in 1970 when aircraft manufacturer Airbus was created. He said the project would strengthen the European contribution to NATO and would move toward what NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte calls NATO 3.0. According to Babiš, it could also help the Czech defense industry. He stressed that the goal is not to compete with the United States. ČTK ↗

"We must learn from the war in Ukraine and look for solutions especially in the field of defense against ballistic missiles. Maybe I'm naive, but I would like to try to convince our partners to focus on such a project," Babiš said. According to him, in Europe people only talk about a shield like the one Israel has, for example. ČT24 ↗

The same proposal was made already in July

Babiš first publicly came up with the idea of a "European Patriot," which he called Europatriot in Paris, after the July NATO summit in Ankara. He said he was led to it by a speech by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said there that Ukraine's biggest problem was ballistic missiles. He wanted to present the proposal in Paris at a meeting of the so-called coalition of the willing, to which he was invited by Emmanuel Macron. Echo24 ↗ Novinky ↗

At that same meeting on July 13, Britain, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Italy, together with Ukraine, announced a coalition for integrated European defense against ballistic missiles. Neither Czechia nor Poland was among the founding members. Novinky ↗ Echo24 ↗

After the meeting, Babiš said he had only learned about the coalition in Paris, and when asked why Czechia was not part of it, he pointed to the previous government. He called it a "de facto coalition of France and Great Britain" and insisted that defense against ballistic missiles should be a project of the European Union, without Britain. Regarding the French-Italian SAMP/T system, which is considered the main European alternative to the Patriot, he said it works "only in declarations and on paper." Echo24 ↗ Yet the SAMP/T system really does exist, and France has also supplied it to Ukraine. Francúzske ministerstvo ozbrojených síl ↗

He then spoke about the coalition itself inconsistently. Still in Paris, he told Czech Television that Czechia was interested in joining, if it were to be a European Union project. However, at a press conference on July 20, he declared that it would probably turn out to be just another one of those "declarations that nothing comes out of," and that Czechia did not need to be part of such things. As an example, he also cited the German European Sky Shield initiative from 2022, whose result, according to him, is "reportedly none." He also announced that he would write a letter to European leaders about Euro Patriot. Novinky ↗ TASR ↗

At the same press conference, he criticized the Ministry of Defense for not informing him about the coalition being prepared, even though, according to him, it had already been discussed at the ministry on May 12. If that was the case, it would already have been during the term of his government, which has been in power since December 2025, whereas in Paris he had blamed the previous cabinet for Czechia's non-participation. Minister Jaromír Zůna (for SPD) admitted to Novinky that he had not worked with the information, and described the coalition as a partial project within the broader European and alliance defense framework, in which Czechia is involved through European Sky Shield. According to Novinky, the government nevertheless wanted to pursue membership. Novinky ↗

The European Commission joined FREYJA

The coalition supports the development of the FREYJA system, led by the Ukrainian company Fire Point with the FP-7.X interceptor. Radars are to be supplied by Germany's Hensoldt, the command center by Norway's Kongsberg, and guidance is to be provided by Germany's Diehl Defence. If European governments and manufacturers supply Fire Point with the missing technologies in time, the company plans to have the first interceptors ready by the end of 2026, a system prototype in the first half of 2027, and a first attempt to intercept a ballistic target around July 2027. The company is aiming for a price under one million euros per interceptor, which, according to Forces News, is a quarter to a sixth of the price of a Patriot missile. Forces News ↗

On Wednesday, September 16, the European Commission signed on to the project. "At the same time, however, we must together reduce our dependence on a single supplier. That is why we want to develop an affordable and modular missile defense system with Ukraine. Cooperation is centered around the Freyja project," von der Leyen said in her State of the Union address, after noting that the EU had, the previous week, approved the purchase of American missiles for the Patriot system for the first time. With the remaining funds from the SAFE instrument, the Commission wants to launch a program of joint projects with Ukrainian companies. Európska komisia ↗

Representatives of the companies Thales, MBDA, Saab, Leonardo, Safran and Eurosam were also present at the coalition's first meeting. Defense News ↗ In early August, STV Group told Echo24 that neither the Czech government nor foreign partners had approached it in connection with this initiative, even though it could offer missile components and rocket engines currently in development. Czechoslovak Group pointed to its experience with radars and command systems. Echo24 ↗

Czechia has nothing to shoot down a ballistic missile with

Czechia does not have its own system for destroying long-range ballistic missiles and relies on NATO's integrated air and missile defense. This has several layers: from Patriots, which mainly protect selected sites, through the Aegis Ashore bases in Poland and Romania, to the Israeli Arrow 3 system, the first parts of which Germany put into operation at the end of 2025. Arrow 3 is part of the European Sky Shield initiative, whose results Babiš questioned in July. "The Czech Republic cannot afford on its own to buy the Patriot system, Arrow 2, or David's Sling," František Mičánek of CEVRO University told Novinky. Novinky ↗ Echo24 ↗

That same morning, when Babiš presented Euro Patriot, SPD leader Tomio Okamura proposed cutting 7.5 billion crowns from the defense ministry's budget, from investments not yet started. Czechia would thus spend 1.96 percent of GDP on defense next year instead of the planned two percent. Under the proposal by Finance Minister Alena Schillerová, the ministry is to receive 191 billion crowns, 36.2 billion more than this year. Novinky ↗

"The coalition partners unfortunately refused to reduce arms spending," Okamura said after the coalition's meeting. According to Motoristé leader Petr Macinka, the commitment to spend two percent of GDP on defense must be honored. The government wants to approve the budget on Monday, September 21. Deník ↗

Limits of this view

Babiš's objection about fragmentation is not without basis. European states operate American Patriots, the French-Italian SAMP/T, and the Israeli Arrow 3. According to experts, SAMP/T's production capacity is not sufficient for the needs of either Ukraine or Europe. Echo24 ↗

FREYJA, too, is not yet a finished system, and its capabilities have not been demonstrated. The first attempt to intercept a ballistic target is not planned until 2027. Babiš's demand that it be a European Union project, in turn, was partly answered by the Commission itself. However, it chose an existing project as the core of the cooperation, not a new program modeled on Airbus. Forces News ↗

In the public sources we reviewed, as of September 17 we found no confirmation that Czechia had joined the coalition, that Babiš had sent the promised letter to leaders, or that Paris or Berlin had publicly reacted to Euro Patriot. We cannot verify non-public negotiations.

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*Illustrative photo: a U.S. Army Patriot missile system launcher in southeastern Poland, September 4, 2024. Wikimedia Commons, author: Capt. Leara Shumate, U.S. Army. Public domain.*