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Putin raises tension on Ukraine, suspends START nuclear pact
Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United States, announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech in which he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.
Putin emphasized, however, that Russia isn’t withdrawing from the pact yet, and hours after his address the Foreign Ministry said Moscow would respect the treaty's caps on nuclear weapons. It also said Russia would continue to exchange information about test launches of ballistic missiles per earlier agreements with the United States.
In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.
“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said ahead of the war’s first anniversary Friday. “The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”
The speech reiterated a litany of grievances he has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign, while vowing no military letup.
Along with limits on the number of nuclear weapons, the 2010 New START envisages broad inspections of nuclear sites. Putin said Russia should stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the U.S. does so, a move that would end a global ban on such tests in place since the Cold War era.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded by calling for Russia and the United States to return to dialogue immediately because “a world without nuclear arms control is a far more dangerous and unstable one.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Moscow’s decision to suspend participation in the treaty as “really unfortunate and very irresponsible."
Read more: Biden in Poland: US, allies 'will never waver' in Ukraine
“We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does,” he said while visiting Greece.
China’s U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun called on the U.S. and Russia to “continue to negotiate with each other in finding a good solution.”
U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking in Poland a day after his surprise visit to Ukraine, did not mention the START suspension but blasted Putin for the invasion. He pledged continued support for Ukraine despite “hard and bitter days ahead.”
“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow and forever,” Biden said at Warsaw's landmark Royal Castle before a cheering crowd of Poles and Ukrainian refugees.
Putin's announcement was the second time in recent days the Ukraine war showed it could spread into perilous new terrain, after Blinken told China over the weekend that it would be a “serious problem” if Beijing provided arms and ammunition to Russia.
China and Russia have aligned their foreign policies to oppose Washington. Beijing has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion or atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, while strongly criticizing Western economic sanctions on Moscow. Late last year, Russia and China held joint naval drills.
The deputy head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, Vadym Skibitskyi, told The Associated Press his agency hasn’t seen any signs so far that China is providing weapons to Moscow.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and made a dash toward Kyiv, apparently expecting to overrun the capital quickly. But stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces — supported by Western weapons — turned back Moscow's troops. While Ukraine has reclaimed many areas initially seized by Russia, the sides have become bogged down elsewhere.
The war has revived the divide between Russia and the West, reinvigorated the NATO alliance, and created the biggest threat to Putin's rule of more than two decades.
In Tuesday's speech, Putin again offered his own version of recent history, discounting Ukraine's arguments that it needed Western help to thwart a Russian military takeover. He has repeatedly depicted NATO’s expansion to include countries close to Russia as an existential threat to his country.
“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it,” he said before an audience of lawmakers, officials and soldiers, and broadcast on all state TV channels.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who was in Ukraine on Tuesday, said she wished Putin had taken a different approach.
“What we heard this morning was propaganda that we already know,” Meloni said in English. “He says (Russia) worked on diplomacy to avoid the conflict, but the truth is that there is somebody who is the invader and somebody who is defending itself.”
Also meeting with Zelenskyy was the newly appointed chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, who led a delegation for the first time since the start of the war and since Republicans won control of the House of Representatives.
Chairman Mike McCaul and a handful of other GOP lawmakers said they had a productive meeting about what Zelenskyy needs for winning the war. He provided them with a list of weapons, including longer-range artillery and air-to-surface systems.
The meeting comes as some hard-right Republicans are vowing to block future U.S. aid to Ukraine. “We have seen time and again the majority of Republicans and Democrats support our assistance to Ukraine,” McCaul said in a statement. “But the Biden administration needs to lay out their long-term strategy.”
Putin denied any wrongdoing in Ukraine, even after Kremlin forces struck civilian targets, including hospitals, and are widely accused of war crimes.
Zelenskyy cited fresh attacks on Ukrainian civilians Tuesday, and downplayed Putin’s speech.
“I have not watched it, because during this time there were missile strikes on Kherson. Twenty-one people were wounded and six were killed,” he said.
Putin also accused the West of taking aim at Russian culture, religion and values. He fired another broadside at Western gender policies that he described as efforts to destroy “traditional” values.
And he said Western sanctions hadn’t “achieved anything and will not achieve anything.” He blasted Russian tycoons who kept their assets in the West and saw them confiscated or frozen as part of the sanctions.
“Believe me, ordinary people had no sympathy for those who lost their yachts, palaces and other assets abroad,” Putin said.
While Russia’s Constitution mandates that the president deliver the state-of-the-nation speech annually, Putin never gave one in 2022. Last year, the Kremlin also canceled two other big annual events — Putin’s news conference and a highly scripted phone-in marathon taking questions from the public.
Reflecting the Kremlin's clampdown on free speech and press, it barred in-person coverage of the address by media from “unfriendly” countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and those in the European Union.
Biden in Poland: US, allies 'will never waver' in Ukraine
President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned of “hard and bitter days ahead" as Russia's invasion of Ukraine nears the one-year mark, but vowed that no matter what, the United States and allies “will not waver” in supporting the Ukrainians.
A day after his surprise visit to Kyiv, Biden used a strongly worded address in neighboring Poland to praise allies in Europe for stepping up over the past year and to send a clear message to Russian President Vladimir Putin that "NATO will not be divided, and we will not tire.”
“One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv,” Biden said before a crowd of thousands outside Warsaw’s Royal Castle. “I can report: Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud. It stands tall and, most important, it stands free."
With Russia and Ukraine each preparing spring offensives, Biden insisted there will be no backing down from what he’s portrayed as a global struggle between democracy and autocracy — though polling suggests American support for ongoing military assistance appears to be softening.
“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow and forever," Biden declared. The U.S. and allies will “have Ukraine's back.”
Biden's speech came a day after his unannounced trip to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and walked the city streets as an air raid siren blared.
Last year, weeks after Russian forces began their attacks on Ukraine, Biden delivered a harsh condemnation of Putin from the gardens of the castle. Speaking Tuesday to a crowd that included Polish citizens and Ukrainian refugees — and millions more following in Ukraine, Russia and around the world — he made his case that Putin's war has been a failure.
“When President Putin ordered his tanks to roll into Ukraine, he thought we would roll over. He was wrong,” Biden said.
The president also declared “the democracies of the world have grown stronger" while the world's autocrats — including Putin — have become weaker.
“Autocrats only understand one word — no, no, no,” Biden said. “No, you will not take my country. No, you will not take my freedom. No, you will not take my future.”
Read more: Putin ups tensions over Ukraine, suspending START nuke pact
Biden was using the trip to prepare allies for an ever-more-complicated stage of the war and to reassure allies in the region that the U.S. was committed for the long haul. He met Tuesday with Moldovan President Maia Sandu — who last week claimed Moscow was behind a plot to overthrow her country’s government using external saboteurs — and with his host Polish President Andrzej Duda.
“We have to have security in Europe,” Biden said at the presidential palace. “It's that basic, that simple, that consequential.”
He described NATO as “maybe the most consequential alliance in history," and he said it's “stronger than it's ever been” despite the Russian leader's hopes that it would fracture over the war in Ukraine.
Duda praised the American president’s visit to Kyiv as “spectacular,” saying it “boosted morale of Ukraine’s defenders.”
He said the trip was “a sign that the free world, and its biggest leader, the president of the United States, stands by them.”
On Wednesday, Biden will meet again with Duda along with other leaders of the Bucharest Nine, the easternmost members of the NATO military alliance. Ukraine is not a member.
While Biden was in Poland, Putin announced that Moscow would suspend its participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United States.
The New START Treaty caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads countries may deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.
Despite his criticisms of Putin, Biden did not mention the START suspension during his speech. And the Russian Foreign Ministry later said that, despite Putin's announcement, it would continue abiding by the treaty's caps.
The conflict in Ukraine — the most significant war in Europe since World War II — has already left tens of thousands of people dead, devastated Ukraine’s infrastructure system and damaged the global economy.
While Biden is looking to use his whirlwind trip to Europe as a moment of affirmation for Ukraine and allies, the White House has also acknowledged that there is no clear endgame to the war in the near term, and the situation on the ground has become increasingly complex.
The administration on Sunday said it has new intelligence suggesting that China, which has generally remained on the sidelines of the conflict, is now considering sending Moscow lethal aid. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it could become a “serious problem” if Beijing follows through.
Biden and Zelenskyy discussed capabilities that Ukraine needs “to be able to succeed on the battlefield” in the months ahead, said U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Zelenskyy has been pushing the U.S. and European allies to provide fighter jets and long-range missile systems known as ATACMS — which Biden has declined to provide so far. Sullivan declined to comment on whether there was any movement on that during the leaders' talk.
With no quick end in sight for the war, the anniversary is a critical moment for Biden to try to bolster European unity and reiterate the West's position that Putin's invasion was a frontal attack on the post-World War II international order. The White House hopes the president's visit to Kyiv and Warsaw will help bolster American and global resolve.
In the U.S., a poll published last week by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that support for providing Ukraine with weapons and direct economic assistance is softening. And earlier this month, 11 House Republicans introduced what they called the “Ukraine fatigue” resolution urging Biden to end military and financial aid to Ukraine, while pushing Ukraine and Russia to come to a peace agreement.
Biden dismissed the notion of waning American support during his visit to Kyiv.
“For all the disagreement we have in our Congress on some issues, there is significant agreement on support for Ukraine,” he said. He described the conflict as "about freedom of democracy at large.”
Biden had high praise for Poland's efforts to assist Ukraine. More than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees have settled in Poland since the start of the war, and millions more have crossed through Poland on their way to other countries. Poland has also provided Ukraine with $3.8 billion in military and humanitarian aid, according to the White House.
The Biden administration announced last summer that it was establishing a permanent U.S. garrison in Poland, creating an enduring American foothold on NATO's eastern flank.
“The truth of the matter is the United States needs Poland and NATO as much as NATO needs the United States,” Biden told Duda on Tuesday.
Putin ups tensions over Ukraine, suspending START nuke pact
Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the U.S., announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech where he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.
In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.
“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in a speech days before the war’s first anniversary on Friday. “The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”
The speech reiterated a litany of grievances that the Russian leader has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign while vowing no military let-up in a conflict that has reawakened fears of a new Cold War.
On top of that, Putin sharply upped the ante by declaring that Moscow would suspend its participation in the so-called New START Treaty. The pact, signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia, caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads the two sides can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.
Putin also said that Russia should stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the U.S. does so, a move that would end a global ban on such tests in place since the Cold War era.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Moscow’s decision as “really unfortunate and very irresponsible.”
“We’ll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does,” he said during a visit to Greece.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and made a dash toward Kyiv, apparently expecting to quickly overrun the capital. But stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces — backed by Western weapons — turned back Moscow’s troops. While Ukraine has reclaimed many areas initially seized by Russia, the two sides have become bogged down in tit-for-tat battles in others.
The war has revived the old Russia-West divide, reinvigorated the NATO alliance, and created the biggest threat to Putin’s more than two-decade rule. U.S. President Joe Biden, fresh off a surprise visit to Kyiv, was in Poland on Tuesday on a mission to solidify that Western unity — and planned his own speech.Observers were expected to scour Putin’s address for any signs of how the Russian leader sees the conflict, where he might take it and how it might end. While the Constitution mandates that the president deliver the speech annually, Putin never gave one in 2022, as his troops rolled into Ukraine and suffered repeated setbacks.
Much of the speech covered old ground, as Putin offered his own version of recent history, discounting arguments by the Ukrainian government that it needed Western help to thwart a Russian military takeover.
“Western elites aren’t trying to conceal their goals, to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ to Russia,” Putin said in the speech broadcast by all state TV channels. “They intend to transform the local conflict into a global confrontation.”
He added that Russia was prepared to respond since “it will be a matter of our country’s existence.” He has repeatedly depicted NATO’s expansion to include countries close to Russia as an existential threat to his country.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who was in Ukraine on Tuesday, said she had hoped that Putin might have taken a different approach.
“What we heard this morning was propaganda that we already know,” Meloni said in English. “He says (Russia) worked on diplomacy to avoid the conflict, but the truth is that there is somebody who is the invader and somebody who is defending itself.”
Putin denied any wrongdoing, even as the Kremlin’s forces in Ukraine strike civilian targets, including hospitals, and are widely accused of war crimes. On the ground Tuesday, the Ukrainian military reported that Russian forces shelled southern cities of Kherson and Ochakiv while Putin spoke, killing six people.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lamented that Russian forces were “again mercilessly killing the civilian population.”
Many observers predicted Putin’s speech would address Moscow’s fallout with the West — and Putin began with strong words for those countries that have provided Kyiv with crucial military support and warned them against supplying any longer-range weapons.
“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it,” Putin said before an audience of lawmakers, state officials and soldiers who have fought in Ukraine.
Putin also accused the West of taking aim at Russian culture, religion and values because it is aware that “it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”
Likewise, he said Western sanctions would have no effect, saying they hadn’t “achieved anything and will not achieve anything.”
Underscoring the anticipation ahead of the speech, some state TV channels put out a countdown for the event starting on Monday. Reflecting the Kremlin’s clampdown on free speech and press, this year it barred media from “unfriendly” countries, the list of which includes the U.S., the U.K. and those in the EU. Peskov said journalists from those nations will be able to cover the speech by watching the broadcast.
He previously told reporters that the speech’s delay had to do with Putin’s “work schedule,” but Russian media reports linked it to the setbacks of Russian forces. The Russian president postponed the state-of-the-nation address before, in 2017.
Last year, the Kremlin also canceled two other big annual events — Putin’s press conference and a highly scripted phone-in marathon where people ask the president questions.
Analysts expected Putin’s speech would be tough in the wake of Biden’s visit to Kyiv on Monday. In his his own speech later Tuesday, Biden is expected to highlight the commitment of the central European country and other allies to Ukraine over the past year.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Biden’s address would not be “some kind of head to head” with Putin’s.
“This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else,” said.
Ukrainian grain shipments drop as ship backups grow
The amount of grain leaving Ukraine has dropped even as a U.N.-brokered deal works to keep food flowing to developing nations, with inspections of ships falling to half what they were four months ago and a backlog of vessels growing as Russia's invasion nears the one-year mark.
Ukrainian and some U.S. officials are blaming Russia for slowing down inspections, which Moscow has denied. Less wheat, barley and other grain getting out of Ukraine, dubbed the “breadbasket of the world, ” raises concerns about the impact to those going hungry in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia — places that rely on affordable food supplies from the Black Sea region.
The hurdles come as separate agreements brokered last summer by Turkey and the U.N. to keep supplies moving from the warring nations and reduce soaring food prices are up for renewal next month. Russia is also a top global supplier of wheat, other grain, sunflower oil and fertilizer, and officials have complained about the holdup in shipping the nutrients critical to crops.
Under the deal, food exports from three Ukrainian ports have dropped from 3.7 million metric tons in December to 3 million in January, according to the Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul. That's where inspection teams from Russia, Ukraine, the U.N. and Turkey ensure ships carry only agricultural products and no weapons.
The drop in supply equates to about a month of food consumption for Kenya and Somalia combined. It follows average inspections per day slowing to 5.7 last month and 6 so far this month, down from the peak of 10.6 in October.
Also Read: Russia’s year of war: Purge of critics, surge of nationalism
That has helped lead to backups in the number of vessels waiting in the waters off Turkey to either be checked or join the Black Sea Grain Initiative. There are 152 ships in line, the JCC said, a 50% increase from January.
This month, vessels are waiting an average of 28 days between applying to participate and being inspected, said Ruslan Sakhautdinov, head of Ukraine's delegation to the JCC. That's a week longer than in January.
Factors like poor weather hindering inspectors’ work, demand from shippers to join the initiative, port activity and capacity of vessels also affect shipments.
“I think it will grow to be a problem if the inspections continue to be this slow,” said William Osnato, a senior research analyst at agriculture data and analytics firm Gro Intelligence. “In a month or two, you’ll realize that’s a couple a million tons that didn’t come out because it’s just going too slowly.”
“By creating the bottleneck, you’re creating sort of this gap of the flow, but as long as they’re getting some out, it’s not a total disaster,” he added.
U.S. officials such as USAID Administrator Samantha Power and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield have blamed Russia for the slowdown, saying food supplies to vulnerable nations are being delayed.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said in statement Wednesday on Facebook that Russian inspectors have been “systematically delaying the inspection of vessels” for months.
They accused Moscow of obstructing work under the deal and then “taking advantage of the opportunity of uninterrupted trade shipping from Russian Black Sea ports.”
Osnato also raised the possibility that Russia might be slowing inspections “in order to pick up more business” after harvesting a large wheat crop. Figures from financial data provider Refinitiv show that Russian wheat exports more than doubled to 3.8 million tons last month from January 2022, before the invasion.
Russian wheat shipments were at or near record highs in November, December and January, increasing 24% over the same three months a year earlier, according to Refinitiv. It estimated Russia would export 44 million tons of wheat in 2022-2023.
Alexander Pchelyakov, a spokesman for the Russian diplomatic mission to U.N. institutions in Geneva, said last month that the allegations of deliberate slowdowns are “simply not true.”
Russian officials also have complained that the country's fertilizer is not being exported under the agreement, leaving renewal of the four-month deal that expires March 18 in question.
Without tangible results, extending the deal is “unreasonable,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin on Monday told RTVI, a privately owned Russian-language TV channel.
U.N. officials say they have been working to unstick Russian fertilizer and expressed hope that the deal will be extended.
“I think we are in slightly more difficult territory at the moment, but the fact is, I think this will be conclusive and persuasive,” Martin Griffiths, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told reporters Wednesday. “The global south and international food security needs that operation to continue.”
Tolulope Phillips, a bakery manager in Lagos, Nigeria, has seen the impact firsthand. He says the cost of flour has exploded 136% since the war in Ukraine began. Nigeria, a top importer of Russian wheat, has seen costs for bread and other food surge.
“This is usually unstable for any business to survive,” Phillips said. “You have to fix your prices to accommodate this increase, and this doesn’t only affect flour — it affects sugar, it affects flavors, it affects the price of diesel, it affects the price of electricity. So, the cost of production has generally gone up.”
Global food prices, including for wheat, have dropped back to levels seen before the war in Ukraine after reaching record highs in 2022. In emerging economies that rely on imported food, like Nigeria, weakening currencies are keeping prices high because they are paying in dollars, Osnato said.
Plus, droughts that have affected crops from the Americas to the Middle East meant food was already expensive before Russia invaded Ukraine and exacerbated the food crisis, Osnato said.
Prices will likely stay high for more than a year, he said. What's needed now is “good weather and a couple of crop seasons to become more comfortable with global supplies across a number of different grains” and “see a significant decline in food prices globally.”
Bulgaria detains 7 over deaths of 18 migrants found in truck
Authorities in Bulgaria have detained seven people in connection with an abandoned truck in which 18 people believed to be migrants were found dead, police said Saturday.
The bodies were discovered Friday in a secret compartment below a load of lumber in the truck, which was left on a highway not far from Bulgaria's capital, Sofia.
Borislav Sarafov, director of Bulgaria's National Investigation Service, confirmed that all the victims had died of suffocation. He called the case the country's deadliest involving smuggled migrants.
Police also found 34 survivors in the truck, most of them in very poor physical condition, Bulgarian Health Minister Assen Medzhidiev said.
All the passengers originally were from Afghanistan and had entered Bulgaria from Turkey while hoping to reach Western Europe, authorities said.
Sarafov said the people who died had perished 10 to 12 hours before the truck was found and that the smugglers had fled the scene after they noticed the deaths.
The seven suspects were detained at different locations across Bulgaria. Investigators were working to determine if the truck's driver was among them.
Also Read: Bodies of 18 migrants found in abandoned truck in Bulgaria
The investigation indicates the suspects belonged to a organized crime ring involved in smuggling migrants from the border with Turkey to the Bulgaria-Serbia border, Sarafov said. Passengers paid 5,000-7,000 euros each, he said.
Bulgaria, a Balkan country of 7 million and the poorest member of the European Union, is located on a major route for migrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan seeking to enter Europe from Turkey. Very few plan to stay, with most using Bulgaria as a transit corridor on their way westward.
Bulgaria has erected a barbed-wire fence along its 259-kilometer (161-mile) border with Turkey, but with the help of local traffickers many migrants still manage to enter.
UK’s Sunak set to say security guarantees need for Ukraine
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Saturday will call on world leaders to “double down” on support for Ukraine, saying arms and security guarantees are needed to protect the country and the rest of Europe from Russian aggression now and in the future.
Sunak will deliver the message in a speech to the Munich Security Conference, an annual meeting of heads of state, defense ministers and other world leaders. This year’s meeting will focus on threats to the accepted rules of international relations a year after Russian troops invaded Ukraine.
Highlighting Britain’s recent commitment to provide battle tanks, advanced air defense systems and longer-range missiles to Ukraine, Sunak will urge other nations to follow suit before Russia launches an expected spring offensive.
“Now is the moment to double down on our military support,” Sunak said in excerpts released ahead of the speech. “When Putin started this war, he gambled that our resolve would falter. Even now he is betting we will lose our nerve.”
Sunak will also call on NATO to provide long-term security guarantees for Ukraine. Such commitments are necessary to shield Ukraine from future Russian aggression and to protect the system of international rules that have helped keep the peace since the end of World War II, Sunak is expected to say.
“It’s about the security and sovereignty of every nation,” Sunak says in the excerpts. “Because Russia’s invasion, its abhorrent war crimes and irresponsible nuclear rhetoric are symptomatic of a broader threat to everything we believe in.”
Finland could join NATO ahead of Sweden: Defense minister
Finland’s defense minister said Saturday that his country will join NATO without waiting for Sweden if its Nordic neighbor’s accession is held up by the Turkish government.
Mikko Savola told The Associated Press on Saturday that Finland would prefer that that the two countries join the alliance together, but it wouldn’t hold up the process if Turkey decides to approve Finland, but not Sweden, as it has warned.
“No, no. Then we will join,” Savola said in an interview on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich.
Since they broke with decades of non-alignment in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Finland and Sweden have insisted they want to join NATO together. But Turkey’s reluctance to accept Sweden unless it steps up pressure on Kurdish exile groups has made it more likely the two will have to join the alliance at different speeds.
“Sweden is our closest partner,” Savola said. “Almost every week our defense forces are practicing together and so on. It’s a very deep cooperation and we also trust fully each other. But it’s in Türkiye’s hands now.”
Speaking later Saturday at a panel in Munich, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin struck a similar note.
“Of course, we cannot influence how some country would ratify, but our message is that we are willing to join and would prefer to join together,” she said.
All NATO countries except Turkey and Hungary have already given both countries the green light to join the alliance. Hungary has said it will do so soon, but Turkey says Sweden hasn’t done enough to meet Turkish national security concerns, causing a rift in NATO at a time when the U.S. and other allies are seeking to project a united front against Russia.
In recent weeks, NATO officials have played down the significance of the two nations joining simultaneously.
“The main is issue is not whether Finland and Sweden are joining at the same time. The main issue is that Finland and Sweden join as soon as possible, and it is of course a Turkish decision whether to ratify both protocols or only one protocol,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Munich on Friday.
Savola said he hopes Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border with Russia, will become a member of the alliance before a NATO summit in July. Until then, Savola said, Finland isn’t worried about the security situation, noting Finland has a conscription army with a wartime strength of 280,000 soldiers, 95% of them reservists, and plans to buy F-35 fighter jets from the U.S., while also investing in its naval and land forces.
“We are strong and our willingness to defend the country is also strong,” Savola said.
Finland has supported Ukraine with weapons from the start of the war. Savola said the military support amounts to 600 million euros so far. The country has said it will participate in a joint effort by European countries to deliver Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, but hasn’t specified whether it will hand over any of its own tanks.
“There are many ways to join. There are those tanks, of course, training, spare parts and logistics,” he said. “We are making those decisions quite soon in Finland.”
In Baltics, Poland, grassroots groups strive to help Ukraine
In a dusty workshop in northern Lithuania, a dozen men are transforming hundreds of wheel rims into potbelly stoves to warm Ukrainians huddled in trenches and bomb shelters. As the sparks subside, one welder marks the countertop: 36 made that day. Hours later, they've reached 60.
People from across Lithuania send old wheel rims to the volunteers gathering weekly in Siauliai, the Baltic country’s fourth-largest city. Two cars loaded with wood stoves wait outside the workshop ahead of the long night drive south.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — three states on NATO’s eastern flank scarred by decades of Soviet-era occupation — have been among the top donors to Kyiv.
Linas Kojala, director of the Europe Studies Center in Lithuania's capital Vilnius, said Ukraine’s successful resistance “is a matter of existential importance” to the Baltic countries, which share its experience of Russian rule.
“Not only political elites, but entire societies are involved in supporting Ukraine,” Kojala told the AP.
In Siauliai, Edgaras Liakavicius said his team has sent about 600 stoves to Ukraine.
“Everybody here ... understands the situation of every man, every soldier, the conditions they live in now in Ukraine,” Liakavicius, who works for a local metal processing plant, told the AP.
Jaana Ratas, who heads an effort in Tallinn, Estonia to make camouflage nets for Ukrainian soldiers, echoed his words.
“My family and most Estonians, they still remember (the Soviet occupation),” she said.
Also Read: Ukrainian refugees safe, but not at peace, after year of war
Ratas chose a symbolic location for her project. Five days a week, Estonian and Ukrainian women gather at Tallinn’s Museum of Occupations and Freedom to weave the nets from donated fabrics.
Lyudmila Likhopud, a 76-year-old refugee from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, said the work has lifted her out of depression.
“I started feeling that I can be useful,” she told the AP.
In Latvia’s capital of Riga, Anzhela Kazakova — who ran a furniture store in the Black Sea port of Odesa — is one of 30 Ukrainian refugees working for Atlas Aerospace, a drone manufacturer that has supplied more than 300 kits to the Ukrainian army.
Ivan Tolchinsky, Atlas Aerospace’s founder and CEO, grew up in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, held by Kremlin-backed separatists since 2014. He had long petitioned both the EU and Ukraine to supply drones to Kyiv’s forces fighting the separatists. Final permission arrived a day before Moscow’s full-scale invasion, he said.
Atlas Aerospace has since increased production 20-fold, Tolchinsky said, and is planning to open a site in Ukraine despite withering Russian strikes on infrastructure.
Tolchinsky’s drones are just some of the weapons flowing to Kyiv from its Baltic allies. Together with their southern neighbor Poland — another NATO and European Union member with a history of Soviet oppression — the three small states rank among the biggest donors per gross domestic product helping Ukraine.
Lithuania, with a mere 2.8 million inhabitants, was the first country to send Stinger air defense missiles, according to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov.
One of the latest Lithuanian initiatives is a crowdfunding drive to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian drones and missiles. Launched in late January, it initially aimed to raise 5 million euros by the Feb. 24 first anniversary of the invasion. That goal was reached within weeks, and organizers have since doubled it as donations keep flowing.
One fundraising group has grown into a major player that participates in international tenders purchasing military equipment for Kyiv.
“We have expanded 10 times in less than a year. (We used to supply) five drones in one batch, but now it’s 50 or more,” said Jonas Ohman, founder of the nongovernmental organization Blue/Yellow. The group recently won a bid for military optics, edging out rivals including the Indian military, and clinched a contract with an Israeli company for multi-purpose high sensitivity radars for Kyiv.
“It’s entirely another level now,” Ohman said.
In Poland, millions of zlotys have been raised to fund everything from advanced weapons to treating the wounded. Backed by over 220,000 contributors, journalist Slawomir Sierakowski was able to gather almost 25 million zlotys ($5.6 million) to buy an advanced Bayraktar drone for Ukraine.
Ohman, the head of the Lithuanian NGO, drew parallels between his compatriots’ readiness to help Kyiv and local partisan movements fighting Soviet rule after World War II.
“It is about personal responsibility in tough times," he said. “Just like in 1945 when (the) Soviets returned, the government was gone, but the struggle for freedom continued in the woods for years.”
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Associated Press writer Joanna Kozlowska contributed to this report from London.
Ukraine invasion reshaped global alliances, renewed fears
Nearly a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the battlefield has narrowed and stiff resistance has forced Moscow to scale back its military goals. But the diplomatic consequences of the war still reverberate worldwide.
The fighting has reshaped global alliances, renewed old anxieties and breathed new life into NATO and the bond between Europe and the United States.
The invasion drew Moscow closer to Beijing and the pariah states of Iran and North Korea. It also raised broad questions about sovereignty, security and the use of military power, while intensifying fears about China’s designs on Taiwan.
“The war underscores the interrelationship between diplomacy and the use of force in a way that has not been thought about in quite the same fashion for many, many years,” said Ian Lesser, vice president of the German Marshall Fund think tank.
When Russian forces invaded on Feb. 24, it “marked the complete end of the post-Cold War world,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said last month in a speech at Johns Hopkins University. “It has come to light that globalization and interdependence alone cannot serve as a guarantor for peace and development across the globe.”
Also Read: Key moments in a year of war after Russia invaded Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that Ukraine is an “integral part” of Russian history that never achieved “real statehood” — a stance that echoes Chinese President Xi Jinping’s position on Taiwan, a self-governed island that Beijing claims as its own.
Some six months after the invasion of Ukraine, China issued a white paper on Taiwan, saying the island “has been an integral part of China’s territory since ancient times.” The paper said Beijing seeks “peaceful reunification” but “will not renounce the use of force.”
China’s designs on Taiwan date to well before the war in Ukraine, but China stepped up its pressure over the past year or more, including firing ballistic missiles over the island and into Japanese waters in August in response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei.
If Russia is allowed to succeed in Ukraine, it could further embolden countries like China, with its visions of an international order “that diverge from ours and that we can never accept,” Kishida said.
He pledged to use Japan’s presidency of the G7 this year to strengthen “the unity of like-minded countries” against Russian aggression.
“If we let this unilateral change of the status quo by force go unchallenged, it will happen elsewhere in the world, including Asia,” he said.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be far more complicated than Russia’s attack on Ukraine, said Euan Graham, a Singapore-based expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Russia's incompetent performance on the battlefield in Ukraine has to give pause to any military or senior political leader in China about an adventure on a much more ambitious scale with Taiwan,” Graham said.
But the fear is real. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen extended the nation’s compulsory military service in a December announcement that referenced the war in Ukraine.
“They’ve drawn the lesson from Ukraine that you need to have a larger military reserve if there is a conflict,” Graham said.
North Korea, which has threatened to preemptively use nuclear weapons in a broad range of scenarios, was already a regional concern. But Russia’s suggestion that it could use nuclear weapons in Ukraine fueled new worries.
South Korea, which is under the protection of the American “nuclear umbrella,” last year expanded exercises with the U.S. military that had been downsized under the Trump administration. South Korea is also seeking stronger assurances that Washington will swiftly use its nuclear capabilities in the face of a North Korean nuclear attack.
North Korea has been strongly supportive of neighboring Russia. Late last year, the U.S. accused Pyongyang of supplying Russia with artillery shells.
Iran has also been helping Russia militarily, providing the bomb-carrying drones Moscow uses to strike power plants and civilian sites throughout Ukraine.
While Western allies have cooperated closely in their responses to the war, a major diplomatic challenge has been to convince much of the rest of the world of the invasion’s significance.
Only a handful of countries in Asia have taken tough action against Moscow, and many abstained from the United Nations resolution condemning the attack.
Just weeks before the invasion, China declared a “no limits” friendship with Russia. It has refused to criticize the war and has drawn closer to Russia, buying more of its oil and gas and helping Moscow to offset Western sanctions.
But there are signs of “complicated fault lines” in the China-Russia relationship, Jude Blanchette, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a call with reporters.
During September talks in Uzbekistan, the Chinese president raised unspecified “concerns” with Putin over the invasion, though at the same time promised “strong support” to Russia’s “core interests.”
“I think if Xi Jinping could snap his fingers, he would like to see the war end but in a way that Russia comes out of this with Putin in power and Russia continuing to be a strong strategic partner,” Blanchette said.
India, which is heavily reliant on Russia for military equipment, also abstained from the U.N. resolution and has continued to purchase Russian oil.
But as regional rival China moves closer to Russia, India has quietly drifted toward the U.S., especially within the four Quad nations that also include Japan and Australia, said Viraj Solanki, a London-based expert with the IISS think tank.
In Europe, the invasion has reinvigorated NATO after a barrage of criticism from Donald Trump during his presidency that led French President Emmanuel Macron to declare the alliance had experienced “brain death.”
NATO member countries and allies have rallied to support Ukraine, with several changing policies that prohibited the export of weapons to countries in conflict. Perhaps most remarkably, Germany shed post-World War II taboos and provided Leopard battle tanks.
The war also prompted Finland and Sweden to seek NATO membership, which most experts think will be approved this year.
NATO last year singled out China for the first time as a strategic challenge, although not a direct adversary. The alliance warned about China’s growing military ambitions, its confrontational rhetoric and its increasingly close ties to Russia.
Beyond NATO, the war has also underscored the importance of the relationship between the U.S. and European Union, which Lesser said has been “absolutely critical” to sanctions and export controls.
China insists that it is the U.S. that started the Ukraine crisis, partially through NATO’s expansion into more Eastern European countries. Beijing has also criticized the alliance for suggesting the war could influence China’s actions in Asia.
“NATO claims to be a regional defense organization, but it keeps breaking through the territory and field, stirring up conflicts, creating tension, exaggerating threats and encouraging confrontation,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin said Thursday.
The war’s long-term effects on global diplomacy are difficult to predict. But Lesser said one thing is certain: It will be “very hard for Russia to recover from the damage to its reputation on many levels.”
A core group of countries such as Syria, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela “may be inclined to stick with Russia,” he said. But in terms of broader diplomacy, Russia’s reputation ”has experienced an enormous blow.”
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Associated Press writers Lorne Cook in Brussels and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
Russian envoy claims West is determined to destroy Russia
A week before the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s U.N. ambassador claimed that the West is driven by its determination to destroy Russia and declared: “We had no choice other than to defend our country — defend it from you, to defend our identity and our future.”
Western ambassadors shot back, accusing Russia of using a Security Council meeting it called on lessons learned from the failure to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists that began in 2014 to justify what France’s U.N. Ambassador Nicolas De Riviere called “the unjustifiable” – Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022.
Friday's meeting in the council — the only international venue where Russia regularly faces Ukraine and its Western supporters — put a spotlight on the deep chasm between the warring parties as the conflict moves into its second year with no end in sight, tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, and new military offensives expected.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused Western nations including France and Germany of “holding back” on implementing the Minsk agreements brokered by the two countries to end the conflict between Ukraine and the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk in the country’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial east that flared in April 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“You knew very well that the Minsk process for you is just a smoke screen, so as to rearm the Kyiv regime and to prepare it for war against Russia in the name of your geopolitical interest,” Nebenzia said.
U.S. deputy ambassador Richard Mills accused Russia of failing to implement “a single commitment it made” in the Minsk agreements while the other signatories — France, Germany, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — “sought to implement them in good faith.”
France’s De Riviere said his country and Germany have worked “tirelessly” since 2015 to promote dialogue between parties. “The difficulties encountered in implementing these agreements can never serve as justification or mitigating circumstances for Russia’s choice to end the dialogue with violence,” he stressed.
De Riviere recalled that exactly a year ago, on Feb. 17, 2022, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin reaffirmed to the council that the Minsk agreements were “the only international legal basis” to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, and that rumors of Russian military intervention were unfounded and stemmed from Western paranoia. Four days later, Russia recognized the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and on Feb. 24 it invaded Ukraine.
“The one and only lesson to be learned here is that Russia, by attacking Ukraine, has chosen alone, to put an end to dialogue and negotiation,” De Riviere said. “It took the decision alone to shatter the Minsk agreements, whose main objective, let us remember, was the reintegration of some regions of Donetsk and Luhansk under full Ukrainian sovereignty, in exchange for broad decentralization.”
Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward also cited Vershinin’s statement to the council that allegations of a Russian attack were baseless a week before President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, and said the United Kingdom had learned some lessons.
“Russia lied when we warned of its intention to attack Ukraine,” she said. “Russia was planning for war while we called for diplomacy and de-escalation, and Russia continues to choose death and destruction while the world calls for a just peace.”
Russia’s Nebenzia blamed “a criminal policy by the Ukrainian leadership which was goaded by the collective West” for refusing to implement the Minsk agreements.
After a year of war, he told Western members of the Security Council, “Obviously, we will not be able to live in the future the way we did in the past.”
Nebenzia accused the West of “deep Russophobia," and a “determination to destroy my country, using others if possible.” And he claimed it is not interested “in building a European and Euro-Atlantic security system together with Russia” because “for you such a system can only be aimed against Russia.”
“We have no trust left in you and we are not able of believing any promises you make — not as regards a non-expansion of NATO in the east, or your desire not to interfere in our internal affairs, or your determination to live in peace,” Nebenzia said.
“You have shown that it’s impossible to negotiate with you," he said. “You’ve shown how treacherous you are by creating on our borders a neo-Nazi, neo-nationalist beehive and then stirring it up.”
Ukraine’s U.N. Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya accused Russia of violating the Minsk agreements, citing as an example the Minsk memorandum of Sept. 19, 2014 ordering all military, militias and mercenaries to leave Ukraine that was never implemented.
“The truth is that Putin has proved once and for all to be impossible to negotiate with,” he said. “Russia’s consistent undermining and final killing of the Minsk agreements make that crystal clear.”
Ukraine urges “healthy forces in Russia, if there are any, to come to their senses and force Putin to implement the demands of the U.N. General Assembly to immediately cease the use of force and to withdraw Russian military forces from Ukraine,” Kyslytsya said. “The dictator should give up and recede into the past.”