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Ukraine updates: Finnish PM says war shows Europe’s weakness
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Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin says the war in Ukraine has exposed basic weaknesses in Europe’s defense and strategy. UK says Russia’s withdrawal allowed Ukraine to target transport nodes. Follow DW for more.
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The prime minister of Finland has said Russia’s war in Ukraine shows that Europe isn’t strong enough.
Visiting Australia, Sanna Marin said the invasion had exposed both European weaknesses and strategic mistakes in dealing with Russia.
“I must be very honest, brutally honest with you, Europe isn’t strong enough right now. We would be in trouble without the United States,” she told Sydney’s Lowy Institute think tank.
Marin insisted Ukraine must be given “whatever it takes” to win the war. She added that the US had been pivotal in supplying Kyiv with the weapons, finance and humanitarian aid necessary to thwart Russian ambitions.
“We have to make sure that we are also building those capabilities when it comes to European defense, the European defense industry, and making sure that we could cope in different kinds of situations,” she said.
Finland, which is seeking NATO membership, won independence from Russia almost 105 years ago, after the Russian Revolution of 1917. It later successfully fought off the Soviet Union in World War II.
Marin also criticized EU policies that had stressed the importance of engagement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. She said the bloc should have listened to member states who were part of the Soviet Union until it collapsed.
“We should have listened to our Baltic and Polish friends much sooner,” Marin said.
Here are the other main headlines from the war in Ukraine on Friday, December 2:
UK ministry says Russia facing fresh logistic headaches
The UK Ministry of Defence says Russia’s withdrawal from the west bank of the Dnipro River last month now affords Ukrainian troops the opportunity to strike additional Russian logistics nodes and lines of communication.
Kherson residents describe torture under Russian occupation
03:32
The ministry said the threat probably caused Russia to relocate supply nodes, including rail transfer points, further south and east.
It said Russian logistics units would probably need to conduct extra labor-intensive loading and unloading from rail to road transport.
The ministry added that Russia’s shortage of munitions exacerbated by these logistics challenges was “likely one of the main factors currently limiting Russia’s potential to restart effective, large scale offensive ground operations.”
Germany delivering hundreds of generators to Ukraine
With Ukraine’s power grid crippled by weeks of Russian airstrikes, Germany is making good on the pledge to deliver hundreds of generators as winter looms.
Germany’s agency for technical relief has already sent nearly 150 devices, with another 320 currently being prepared for transport, the officials said. Some of the generators can be mounted on car trailers so they can be moved around affected areas.
The agency said that some of the new equipment was sent to Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s largest energy supplier. More German generators are to be deployed to Odesa and Mykolaiv as well as the recently liberated Kherson.
More coverage of the war in Ukraine
Visiting Berlin, NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg has praised defense spending increases in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He also called on Germany to keep pushing to reform and upgrade its military.
The European Union is close to locking a deal capping the sale of Russian oil at $60 per barrel. The cap is meant to limit Russia’s revenues from oil sales while avoiding an all out ban that risks prices shooting up.
OSCE foreign ministers are meeting in Poland, which did not invite Russia’s Sergey Lavrov in light of the war in Ukraine. Moscow railed against this step, while Western countries argued the Kremlin only had itself to blame.
rc/dj (dpa, Reuters, AFP, AP)
