This week’s tales in EU hypocrisy were shameless doozies.

A report by British members of parliament found that the U.K. is honoring more than 250 export licenses of lethal weapons and war supplies to Russia, contracts worth nearly $250 million.

British manufacturers and brokers were allowed to keep supplying Russia with “weapons sights, sniper rifles, bomb-proof suits, unmanned aerial vehicles, military helicopter components and cryptographic equipment,” writes Tim Stanley in the London Telegraph. A shipment of surface-to-air missile components was destined for the Brazilian navy that has permission to dock in Russian ports, the Department for Business said, according to UK journalists.

Elsewhere, Germany’s spineless politicians let German defense firm Rheinmetall build a combat simulation training center in Mulino, Russia capable of training 30,000 Russian combat troops per year. The contract was worth $140 million.

“It’s unfortunate that German companies were directly supporting and training Russia’s military even during the attacks against Ukraine,” one senior Senate aide told The Daily Beast In April. “The U.S. government should call on our NATO allies to suspend all military connections with Russia at this point, until the Russians leave Ukraine, including Crimea.” 

The U.S. government did call for a suspension of military ties with Russia, but the Europeans aren’t listening – especially France President Francois Hollande, who is justifying his nation’s sale of the Mistral attack warship to Russia by saying there is no EU arms embargo in place. Instead of wimping and weaseling out, France should show moral courage by pushing the EU to impose tough sanctions against Russia’s energy, finance and military sectors. 

The question before the July 17 shoot-down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was how many Ukrainians have to be killed before the West will act? We still have not found the answer yet because, even as Ukraine’s death tolled has soared to nearly 1,000 civilians and soldiers since Russia’s Feb. 27 invasion of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, the West has done little but issue statements of deep concern and toothless threats. Stronger action also is slow in coming after the murders of nearly 300 innocent lives aboard MH17. The question is now amended: How many people does Putin’s war have to kill before the West confronts his threat to world peace? 

It’s is no longer out of the question that the weapons and training that the three EU giants have lavished on the nuclear-armed dictator could be used against them and their citizens one day.

If the EU continues to let money and cowardice trump its supposed democratic values, the 28-nation bloc could find itself going in the same year from winning the favor of most Ukrainians to losing it. The West’s weakness is even more baffling considering that it is extending billions of dollars in loans and millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. The money will go to waste if there’s no peace. The sums will be inadequate to fix the damage that Russia is inflicting regularly by killing people, shooting down nearly a dozen planes and helicopters and blowing up infrastructure.

More Ukrainians realize that they can only depend on themselves and that the nation will have to mobilize and militarize quickly and massively after the West abandoned the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guarantees to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for Kyiv surrendering its nuclear arsenal. Sadly, Ukraine is still waiting for leaders to emerge in the West.