“Moscow does not limit itself to anything”: Polish foreign ministers support Ukraine's authorization to strike Russia with Western weapons

In the wake of Russian attacks on the Kharkiv shopping center and a residential area of ​​the city, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski backed a proposal to allow Ukraine to launch strikes with Western weapons on Russian territory .

He said Europe must learn to play the game of escalation better, leaving Vladimir Putin uncertain about our intentions.

The Polish Foreign Minister said this in an interview with The Guardian.

On the question of allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons to strike Russian territory, Sikorski emphasized that Russia strikes everything it can in Ukraine.

“Russians are attacking Ukraine's power grid, grain terminals, gas storage facilities and civilian infrastructure. The Russian operation is being carried out from headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. Besides the fact that Russia does not use nuclear weapons, it does not limit itself in any way,” Sikorski said.

He said that the constant proclamation of “What our own red line is only encourages Moscow to adapt its hostile actions to our ever-changing limits. »

He was skeptical of Russian threats to use nuclear weapons, saying: “The Americans told the Russians that if you detonate a nuclear bomb, even if it doesn't kill anyone, we will hit all your targets. [positions] in Ukraine, with conventional weapons, we will destroy them all.”

“I think it’s a credible threat. Furthermore, the Chinese and Indians read Russia the riot act. And this is not child's play, because if this taboo were also to be broken, such as that of not changing borders by force, China knows that Japan and Korea would go for nuclear weapons, and they probably don’t want to,” the minister noted.

The European military-industrial complex

Although it said Russia was mainly winning small, Pyrrhic victories, the Weimar Group supported a broad attempt to fill large gaps in the EU's defense capabilities formed at the end of the Cold War.

“We allowed all of these production facilities to close after the end of the Cold War. It costs money to persuade companies to keep their production lines in reserve. We just didn't pay the money. This was part of the peace dividend. And in hindsight, that seems like a mistake. It is obvious that Europe is lagging behind and that the EU's military, technological and industrial base is suffering from years of underinvestment,” said the Polish Foreign Minister.

He admitted that European defense manufacturers still did not believe the rearmament process was permanent, and said Vladimir Putin was spending 40% of his GDP on defense and would eventually bankrupt his country by making the army so greedy in resources.

Russia has 3.5 million people in the military-industrial complex. In contrast, “Europe has not only disarmed, it has deindustrialized the defense domain,” Sikorski said.

He said: “The companies were telling me: 'We read in the newspapers that there is all this demand for weapons but we are not getting long-term contracts.' And if we don't have a 10-year contract, we are responsible to our shareholders. We cannot make the investments. So it's about reassuring them that it's not just for tomorrow, but that it's about rearmament and long-term change in terms of security.”

Additionally, Sikorski spoke about Russian methods of influencing politics in other countries. He warned that Putin was trying to court the right in Europe and the United States by using traditionalism as a weapon.

“He is an absurd leader of international conservatism. We're talking about a KGB colonel, for God's sake. I think the Russians did some polling about 15 years ago, or maybe they just noticed that on certain issues like attitudes towards homosexuality, gender, towards all kinds of identities, we could create divisions in our societies. On this point, for example, Central Europe was 10 or 15 years behind Western Europe in terms of attitude. » Sikorski said.

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