Berlin says EU will not be able to deliver a million munitions – L’Express

The EU will not be able to deliver a million munitions to Ukraine before spring

Blinken promises US support during winter

The European Union will not be able to deliver one million munitions to Ukraine before spring, as it had committed to, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday, November 14. “The million will not be reached, we must assume it,” affirmed Boris Pistorius on his arrival in Brussels, before a meeting of the Defense Ministers of the 27.

The European Union has so far supplied some 300,000 artillery munitions to Ukraine from its stockpiles.

Russian attacks killed three people on Monday and injured twelve including a two-month-old baby in Kherson, a large city in southern Ukraine, local authorities announced. Two people, a 62-year-old woman and a 45-year-old man, were killed and ten others injured during an artillery attack on the center of the city, the region’s governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Telegram .

According to this source, this attack “destroyed or damaged” a hospital, an administrative building, around fifteen houses and eight vehicles including an ambulance. Two caregivers and a hospital patient were injured, according to the governor.

The head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken promised Monday to a senior Ukrainian official that the United States’ support for Kiev would continue, including during the winter, when Russian strikes on essential infrastructure are once again expected .

Antony Blinken met with Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during a brief stopover in Washington for the secretary of state returning from another Middle East tour, and ahead of the Asia-Pacific summit in Apec in San Francisco.

“In all of our conversations with the Ukrainian government, we have emphasized that we will continue to stand with them,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters. Antony Blinken discussed with Andriy Yarmak “the measures we can take together with Ukraine to strengthen its infrastructure ahead of the coming winter,” said Matthew Miller. “Of course, we saw last winter that Russia was trying to destroy energy sites in Ukraine. They might try again,” he added.

The European Commission hopes to announce a new package of sanctions against Russia on Wednesday, which should put an end to Russian diamond exports to the EU, the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell announced on Monday. “We are finalizing the last details of this package” of sanctions, the 12th since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Josep Borrell told the press.

Once decided, these sanctions will still have to be unanimously approved by the 27 EU countries. Moscow is accused of financing part of its war against Ukraine through the lucrative trade in diamonds, which represent a turnover of around four to five billion dollars per year.

Belgium has lifted its reservations about these sanctions, decided by the G7 countries, and proposed solutions, in particular through a tracking system to make them effective, without penalizing its own industry, flourishing in Antwerp.

The Ukrainian army will be able to train its pilots to operate the highly anticipated American F-16 fighters at the earliest in early 2024 in Romania, where a training center was inaugurated on Monday. The training hub is located at an air base in Fetesti, in southeastern Romania, about 150 km from the capital Bucharest.

The program will begin “most likely” at the beginning of next year, a spokesperson for the Dutch army, which supplies the devices, told AFP. For his part, Romanian Defense Minister Angel Tilvar did not give a timetable, saying “to analyze the most effective ways to integrate the training of the Ukrainians as soon as possible.”

Ukraine, which is impatiently waiting to be able to use these planes on the front against Russia, welcomed the opening of the center on the territory of its neighbor. “This is a concrete and significant contribution to the air coalition,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky commented on X (ex-Twitter).

The Russian Defense Ministry claims to have shot down “four Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over the Moscow, Tambov, Bryansk and Oryol regions” during the night from Monday to Tuesday. “The air defense systems in service destroyed” the four drones, said the ministry in a message published on Telegram this Tuesday morning.