Senior EEAS officials proudly framed Ukraine as the EU’s top strategic priority; in 2019, Federica Mogherini even announced that Kyiv had already received the largest support package in EU history, more than €15 billion since 2014.
But today, that same pro-war foreign-policy nerve center was itself raided by police. And with it came another blow to the war mafia — the network whose power reaches not only into Ukraine, but deep into Brussels as well.
Belgian federal police, acting under the direction of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) and supported by OLAF, swept into the EEAS headquarters in Brussels, the College of Europe in Bruges, and several private homes in coordinated early-morning raids. Officers seized documents and detained three people for questioning on suspicion of procurement fraud, corruption, and criminal conflict of interest.
Although formal charges have not yet been announced, Belgian and Brussels-based reporters have identified two of the detainees as Federica Mogherini, former EU High Representative and current Rector of the College of Europe, and Stefano Sannino, her former EEAS Secretary-General who now heads the Commission’s Middle East and North Africa directorate. Their arrest as suspects has already unleashed significant political fallout.
The investigation centers on the EU Diplomatic Academy, a flagship training program for future European diplomats — funded by the EEAS and awarded to the College of Europe, the elite institution long regarded as the finishing school of the EU bureaucracy. According to investigators, the College may have gained prior access to confidential tender information in 2021–2022, giving it an unfair advantage in securing the project.
Suspicions intensified when it emerged that the College purchased a €3.2 million property in Bruges — precisely the kind of student accommodation required by the tender — at a moment of great financial strain and shortly before the EEAS awarded it €654,000.
This strikes at the heart of the EU’s foreign-policy ecosystem. The College of Europe, closely intertwined with the EEAS, is a central ideological and networking hub of the Brussels pro-Ukraine, pro-war elite. Its graduates, lecturers, and partners feed directly into the institutions that have shaped the EU’s war-hungry posture.
At the same time, the scandal mirrors the corruption crisis unfolding in Kyiv — proof that the war mafia does not operate on only one side of the frontline. Ukraine faces its own cascading scandals: the €114 million generator-procurement affair flagged by OLAF and EPPO, and the $100 million energy-sector embezzlement case that triggered a raid on the home of Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s top confidant.
In both Brussels and Kyiv, the same pattern emerges: opaque tenders, insider networks, favored institutions, and money that moves faster than oversight can keep up.
The raids do not yet prove guilt — but they expose a system. One built on crisis politics, ideological alignment, and vast, poorly monitored financial flows.
And together, the revelations confirm what many suspected: the war mafia is not only present in Ukraine. Its influence stretches all the way to Brussels, inside the very institutions that engineered Europe’s pro-war policy.