Radosław Sikorski also says he favours deepest possible inclusion of UK in EU defence structures
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Radosław Sikorski also called for majority voting for EU sanctions as some of them [EU sanctions] “have been delayed by one member state blocking them”
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Sikorski said Poland backed the right of Ukraine to strike at military targets inside Russia, arguing that the west had to stop constantly limiting itself in what it does to support Ukraine. He said:
“The Russians are hitting the Ukrainian’s electricity grid and their grain terminals and gas storage capacity, civilian infrastructure. The Russian operation is conducted from the HQ at Rostov-on-Don. Apart from not using nuclear weapons, Russia does not limit itself much."
"Always declaring what our own [the EU’s] red line is only invites Moscow to tailor its hostile actions to our constantly changing self-imposed limitations.”
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Poland is spending 4% of its GDP on defence and Sikorski said other countries had catching up to do
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Sikorski admitted European defence manufacturers still did not feel that the process of rearmament was permanent, and said Vladimir Putin was spending 40% of GDP on defence and would eventually bankrupt his country by making the military so resource hungry
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Sikorski said that it should be an EU crime to breach EU sanctions and therefore prosecutable by the European prosecution service
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Sikorski was sceptical about Russian threats to use nuclear weapons, saying:
“The Americans have told the Russians that if you explode a nuke, even if it doesn’t kill anybody, we will hit all your targets [positions] in Ukraine with conventional weapons, we’ll destroy all of them.” Adding:
“I think that’s a credible threat. Also, the Chinese and the Indians have read Russia the riot act. And it’s no child’s play because if that taboo were also to be breached, like the taboo of not changing borders by force, China knows that Japan and Korea would go nuclear, and presumably they don’t want that.”
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Sikorski has been a critical figure in taking Poland back to the mainstream of European foreign policy since elections last October led to a new coalition government and an end to eight years of rule by the rightwing nationalist Law and Justice party.
He had just come from a meeting in Berlin with the foreign ministers of France and Germany in the so-called Weimar triangle format, a grouping now seen as the new political powerhouse of the EU.
Although he said Russia was winning mainly small pyrrhic victories, the Weimar group backed a broadly drawn attempt to fill big gaps in EU defence capabilities formed at the end of the cold war.
I think the Russians about 15 years ago did some polling, or maybe they just noticed that on some issues like attitudes to homosexuality, gender, to all kinds of identities, you can drive wedges in our societies.
Although he said the Weimar triangle would have expanded to a quartet but for Brexit, Sikorski said Poland favoured “the deepest possible inclusion of the United Kingdom in the EU security and defence structures, if you so wish”.
Asked whether it was permissible for Ukraine to strike military targets inside Russia, he said: “The Russians are hitting the Ukrainian’s electricity grid and their grain terminals and gas storage capacity, civilian infrastructure.
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He understands.