Welcome to the European Parliamentary Research Service podcasts.

Today we'll be talking about the European Peace Facility, a new off-budget fund that gives the EU more flexibility in choosing who and what to support in its efforts to promote peace and security across the world.

The world is changing fast and so are security threats.

In the face of increasing global instability, the European Union is determined to strengthen its capacity for action and its role

as a global security provider. The question is, how? Well, the common security and defense policy

has always been an important dimension of the EU's external policy. It allows the union to offer

assistance to third states, international organizations

and regional organizations engaged in peace support operations. It also provides the union with its

own operational capacity, allowing it to deploy civilian and military assets provided by the member

states in third countries.

However, while many of the operations and missions, the EU supports have military and defense

implications under current rules, the EU cannot use money from the EU budget to finance

activities with military or defence implications.

Which means that member states taking part in such missions need to use their own national

budgets to help foot the bill. Right?

That's right.

So what is going to change now?

Beatrix Imancamp follows foreign and security policy within the European Parliament Research Service.

Well, Member States have agreed to set up a new fund which will make it easier for them to share some of the costs of EU military operations among all Member States,

even those that do not contribute troops to a mission, or only a few.

Since such costs cannot be charged to the Union budget, it is a so-called

off-budget fund and it will be worth up to 5 billion euros for the next seven years.

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