The Polish Prime Minister warns that Europe must be ready to shoulder its own load WITH America if Putin decide’s to push past the sitaution in Ukraine right now….
Ukraine engergy infrastructure is stressed by Russia attacks like the previous two winters….
The question of what IS the status of the conflict?
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has delivered a blunt warning that Europe has entered a “pre-war era” and if Ukraine is defeated by Russia, nobody in Europe will be able to feel safe.
“I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past,” he told European media. “It’s real and it started over two years ago.”
His remarks came as a fresh barrage of Russian missiles targeted Ukraine.
Russia has intensified its bombardment of Ukraine in recent weeks.
Overnight into Friday Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 58 drones and 26 missiles and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said energy infrastructure had been damaged in six regions, in the west, centre and east of the country.
Ukraine’s national energy company has announced emergency blackouts in three regions of the country – Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kirovograd – and have urged consumers to limit electricity use. The provider, Ukrenergo, blamed “the massive Russian attack on Ukrainian power plants overnight.”
Mr Tusk, a former president of the European Council, said Russian President Vladimir Putin had already blamed Ukraine for the jihadist attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall without any evidence and “evidently feels the need to justify increasingly violent attacks on civil targets in Ukraine”.
He pointed out that Russia had attacked Kyiv with hypersonic missiles in daylight for the first time earlier this week.
He used his first foreign interview since returning to office as Polish prime minister at the end of last year to deliver a direct appeal to Europe’s leaders to do more to bolster its defences.
Regardless of whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump won November’s US presidential election, he argued Europe would become a more attractive partner to the US if it became more self-sufficient militarily…..
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Mar 29, 2024 – ISW Press
Discussions of the character of the Russian war in Ukraine have increasingly adopted terms such as “stalemate” and “attritional” to describe the state of the conflict. Both terms draw parallels with the Western Front of the First World War that are not wholly inaccurate but that can be misleading if taken too far. The current Russian war in Ukraine is certainly not stalemated in the sense of having reached a point where neither side can make further progress. Nor is it, properly speaking, attritional. An attritional war is one in which attrition itself is the victory mechanism — that is, one side aims to win by wearing the other down through losses.