Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian territory poses a lot of uncomfortable questions for Western policy makers – including how, and how much, to ramp up defence R&D. Hitherto, the European consensus was to keep civilian and military types of research in separate programmes: for Brussels since 2016, that has meant separate funding and management, in the Framework Programme (now called Horizon Europe) and the European Defence Agency. But in the past few years, talk of “synergies” between the two has risen.