West unites behind Ukraine US, India hold talks on Russian energy price caps: Sullivan
Amid the Nato, G7 summits, Russia said Western nations were prolonging the war by sending arms to Kyiv
Agencies
MADRID/MOSCOW: Western allies vowed on Tuesday to boost Nato’s defences and to back Ukraine to the end as Moscow demanded Kyiv’s surrender.
Allied leaders were gathered in Madrid for a Nato summit, even as Russian missiles continued to pound Ukrainian cities.
The Nato leaders faced tough talks with Turkey to unblock Sweden’s and Finland’s bids to defy Russian threats join the Atlantic alliance. But they were determined to preserve a united front in the face of Moscow’s four-month-old invasion of prowestern Ukraine.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters arriving with President Joe Biden that Washington will announce “historic” new longterm military deployments in Europe.
The reinforcements will join Nato’s eastern flank, Russia’s nervous neighbours like the Baltic states, and reflect a long-term change “in the strategic reality” elsewhere in Europe.
Before travelling to Madrid, Biden and other leaders of the G7 powers -- the world’s richest democracies -- had held a summit in the German Alps.
Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted afterwards that his country, a laggard in defence spending, would build “the largest conventional army within the Nato framework in Europe”.
Russia’s invasion, he said, had convinced Berlin “that we should spend more... an average of around 70 to 80 billion euros a year on defence over the next few years”.
At the G7 summit, the leaders agreed to impose new sanctions targeting Moscow’s defence industry, raising tariffs and banning gold imports from the country.
The US treasury said the measures “strike at the heart of Russia’s ability to develop and deploy weapons and technology used for Vladimir Putin’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine”.
The new set of sanctions target Rostec, Russia’s largest defence conglomerate, as well as military units and officers implicated in human rights abuses in Ukraine, the Treasury said.
Putin’s Kremlin was not fazed by the sanctions, warning that Ukraine’s forces’ only option was to lay down their arms in the face of the Russian invasion.
“The Ukrainian side can stop everything before the end of today,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
“An order for the nationalist units to lay down their arms is necessary,” he said, adding that Kyiv had to fulfil a list of Moscow’s demands.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday the more Western countries send weapons to Ukraine the longer the conflict will last.
The consequences of Russia’s four-month-old invasion were on display in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, where shaken civilians recounted Monday’s missile strike on a shopping mall.
All that was left of centre -scene of at least 18 deaths -- was charred debris, chunks of blackened walls and lettering from a smashed store front. Russia claims its missile salvo was aimed at an arms depot - but none of the civilians who talked to AFP knew of any weapons store in the neighbourhood.
And, outside Russia, the latest carnage sparked only Ukrainian fury and western solidarity.
“Indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians constitute a war crime,” the G7 leaders said in a statement, condemning the “abominable attack”.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky declared on his social media, “Only total insane terrorists, who should have no place on Earth, can strike missiles at civilian objects.”
Meanwhile, with fierce artillery duels continuing in the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian officials said the central city of Dnipro and several other sites had been hit by more Russian missiles. Pro-moscow forces detained Igor Kolykhayev, the elected mayor of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.
Here are the main plans drawn up by the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States in tackling the myriad of crises facing the globe at the end of a three-day summit
WASHINGTON: The US has begun discussions with India on the modalities and implications of a price cap on Russian energy imports, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday.
At their summit meeting in Germany this week, G7 leaders floated the idea of imposing price caps on Russian energy imports and instructed their concerned ministers to work out the details.
The move is a part of the West’s effort to meet dual objectives: deprive Russia of revenue from energy exports - seen as a key source of its war financing efforts in Ukraine, while ensuring that the global energy market stabilises, given the inflationary pressures caused by galloping energy prices across the world.
When asked if President Joe Biden had spoken to PM Narendra Modi about the issue — both leaders were at the G7 meet and while they did not have a formal bilateral exchange, they interacted informally — Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One, as the president made his way to Spain for a Nato summit, that the task of determining how a price cap will work requires intense engagement with consuming countries.
“India is one of those countries... We have begun talks with India about how a price cap would work and what the implications of it would be. And I will leave it at that because, of course, those are ongoing diplomatic discussions,” he said.
Pressed again on whether Biden and Modi had spoken about the issue, the NSA said they had not but referred to engagements at other levels.
“The President did not speak with Prime Minister Modi about this yesterday, but at senior levels of the US government, we had communications with the Indians yesterday. Before it goes to leader-to-leader level, we need to work through the details with their team at basically the Cabinet level, which is where it is right now. And then, if necessary, it can be elevated.”
The latest rounds of India-us conversations on Russia and energy are happening even as Washington is concerned about India’s acceleration of Russian imports.
READ THE FULL STORY: Too early to judge how this will affect energy market or India’s choices