The European Commission said Wednesday that Italy was among 18 EU member states to have applied for access to the new SAFE facility loan facility to invest in key defence areas like air missile defence, drones, or strategic enablers.
It said the other countries were Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Finland.
It said requests had been made for around 127 billion euros of funding out of the 150 made available by the EU executive.
