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Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said failing to build defences would be ‘irresponsible’
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Europe should prepare for Russia to strike deep into the region, Poland’s foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski has warned.
The Polish deputy leader warned that failing to build defences such as a “drone wall” on Europe’s eastern flank would be “irresponsible”.
Speaking on a visit to parliament in London, where he unveiled a Shahed Iranian drone downed in Ukraine, he said: “We should be prepared to counter that, and so I think not to build anti-drone and drone capacity these days would be irresponsible,” he said.
Russia could “reach, unfortunately, deep into Europe”, he said.
It comes as Donald Trump has warned Russia that the war must end because it’s not making the country look good.
The US president said: “I had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin, but he just doesn’t want to end that war, and I think it’s making them look very bad. “He could end it… he could end it quickly.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said he would discuss the possibility of purchasing Tomahawk missiles from the US during a meeting with Trump on Friday.
Nato defense ministers will meet on Wednesday to try to drum up more military support for Ukraine amid a sharp drop in deliveries of weapons and ammunition to the war-ravaged country in recent months.
The ministers will also debate a call from Nato’s commander to lift restrictions on the use of their aircraft and other equipment so they can be used to defend the alliance’s eastern border with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine more effectively.
A series of mysterious drone incidents and airspace violations by Russian war planes has fueled concerns that President Vladimir Putin might be testing Nato’s defensive reflexes. Some leaders have accused him of waging a hybrid war in Europe. Moscow denies probing Nato’s defenses.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a loyal ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, has warned President Donald Trump that the U.S. handing subsonic Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine would mean “nuclear war.”
Trump is reportedly considering a request by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the Tomahawks, which have a 1,500-mile range that would enable Kyiv to strike much deeper into Russian territory, hitting strategic targets such as the invader’s enemy infrastructure, military bases, and munitions factories.
Zelensky has argued that ramping up the arms available to his country would increase the pressure on the Kremlin to agree to a peace deal.
Ukraine’s prime minister said she was focusing on Russian attacks on her country’s energy grid in talks in Washington ahead of a visit later this week by president Volodymyr Zelensky.
“At every meeting in Washington we raise the topic of defending Ukrainian energy and supporting our resilience over the winter and ways to defend it,” prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.
She described the priorities of her visit as “energy, sanctions and the development of cooperation with the USA in new ways that can strengthen both our countries”.
Zelensky meets US president Donald Trump on Friday to discuss Ukraine’s air defence and long-range strike capabilities. The leaders spoke twice last weekend amid intensifying discussions about the potential provision of long-range Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv.
A network overload and the residual effects of previous Russian attacks triggered blackouts in Kyiv and other Ukrainian regions late last night, officials said.
Water pressure was also affected in parts of the capital.
The Kyiv City State Administration said the overload had caused a problem in one of the capital’s energy sites.
Power was cut in three central Kyiv districts on the west bank of the Dnipro River running through the city. The Kyiv metro was temporarily forced to rely on reserve power to keep operating. The administration later said emergency crews had restored power to affected areas, though outages were still being reported. It said water pressure would be restored to normal levels within two to three hours.
Ukrenergo, which operates Ukraine’s high-voltage lines, said lingering problems from Russian attacks on the energy system had triggered outages in regions across northern, central and southeastern Ukraine.
Hot on the heels of a major diplomatic victory in Gaza that saw the remaining Israeli hostages released by Hamas, president Donald Trump is looking to repeat his success in a far more challenging arena: The nearly four-year-old Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Trump, who has said he thought this conflict would be the “easiest” to settle, is set to host Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday in what could be a pivotal visit for Zelensky, who is openly seeking access to more advanced American weaponry that would let his armed forces strike targets deep inside Russia.
While Trump was able to leverage America’s relationship with Netanyahu’s government to force the Israeli leader to accept a settlement over the objections of several members of his right-wing coalition, the president doesn’t have the same pressure points to work with Putin.
Britain’s defence secretary John Healy said on Wednesday his country’s jets will keep flying over Poland until the end of this year as the British commitment to the Eastern sentry mission is extended.
“We are also ramping up our drone production for Ukraine,” he told reporters before attending a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels.
The UK has delivered more than 85,000 military drones to Ukraine over the past six months, the defence secretary is to announce, amid a surge in Russian attack drone strikes.
John Healey will say that £600m has been put towards drones for Kyiv’s armed forces.
The drones – including tens of thousands of short-range first-person-view models – are being used for reconnaissance, precision strikes and to disrupt Russian operations behind the front lines.
He will tell the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels tomorrow that Western countries need to “ramp up drone production to outmatch (Vladimir) Putin’s escalation”.
Western officials said that in September, Russia launched around 5,500 one-way attack drones into Ukraine – a significant increase from 4,100 in August.
In October so far, more than 2,400 have already been launched, with attacks focused on Ukrainian gas storage and production facilities.
Nato chief Mark Rutte has mocked one of Russia’s submarines for “limping home from patrol”, claiming the vessel had been forced to surface because of technical problems.
Russia’s Black Sea Fleet denied its diesel-powered submarine Novorossiysk had suffered a serious malfunction, after it surfaced in French waters on the weekend and was escorted by Dutch authorities through the English Channel.
Mr Rutte’s public ridicule of Moscow’s military capability signals tensions between Europe and Russia continue to escalate in the midst of the war in Ukraine.
In a speech in Slovenia, Mr Rutte dismissed Moscow’s argument that the vessel surfaced because it was complying with navigation rules in the English Channel, as he argued it was broken.
A World Health Organization team came under attack while accompanying a United Nations convoy in Ukraine, but managed to deliver medical supplies to the city of Bilozerka, director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X.
Two World Food Programme trucks were damaged in the incident, Tedros said. He reiterated calls for attacks on humanitarian workers to end.
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