LONDON/BRUSSELS: Britain is sending Ukraine more Starstreak anti-aircraft missiles and 800 anti-tank missiles after an “unconscionable” attack on a train station, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Friday.
The “high-grade military equipment” is worth GBP100 million ($130 million, 120 million euros), Johnson said, with the UK anti-tank missiles seen as particularly potent against Russian forces.
The attack at Kramatorsk “shows the depths to which (Vladimir) Putin’s once-vaunted army has sunk,” he told reporters alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who called the Russian strike “atrocious.”
Fifty people were killed at the railway station, including five children, Ukrainian officials said as the toll rose on one of the deadliest strikes of the six-week-old war.
Scholz also defended Germany against criticism that it is dragging its feet on ending Russian energy imports as part of Western sanctions over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We are doing all we can and we are doing a lot,” the chancellor said, pointing to Germany’s long-term diversification to alternative energy and other suppliers for natural gas.
“This is, as you may imagine, not that easy because it needs infrastructure that has to be built first. So pipelines to the northern shore of Germany, regasification ports that make it possible for example that LNG ships could give their supply to the gas grid in Germany.”
A stoppage of Russian gas imports is tougher for Germany, which in the first quarter received 40 percent of deliveries from Russia. Germany wants to cut the share of Russian gas to 24 percent by this summer. But it could take until the summer of 2024 for Europe’s largest economy to end its reliance on Russian gas.
After talks with Scholz in Downing Street, Johnson said Britain and Germany would work together on renewable technologies.
“We cannot transform our energy systems overnight, but we also know that Putin’s war will not end overnight,” the prime minister said.
The UK and German leaders met as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell visited Ukraine.
Von der Leyen visited a mass grave in Bucha, a town outside Kyiv where Russian forces are accused by Ukraine of massacring civilians.
Asked whether he also intended to visit Kyiv, Johnson said “we are trying to help people come from Ukraine,” pointing to German and British efforts to shelter refugees fleeing the war.
Meanwhile, European Union leaders will meet on May 30-31 in an extraordinary summit to discuss the Ukraine war and the bloc’s energy situation.
“As discussed in Versailles and during the last European Council, a special European Council will take place on 30 and 31 May. On the agenda notably defense, energy and Ukraine,” EU Council president Charles Michel wrote on Twitter.
The European Union this week approved new sanctions against Russia, including a ban on coal imports starting in August. Germany has intensified efforts to reduce its exposure to Russian energy imports following Russian’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Moscow calls its offensive a “special military operation” to demilitarise its neighbor. Ukraine and Western supporters call that a pretext for an unprovoked invasion.
(With AFP and Reuters)
