‘Peace is over’ Call for west to boost arms production
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, praised US politicians last week for approving a long-delayed military aid package, but said western allies needed to recognise that “the era of peace in Europe is over”.
As Joe Biden signed the bill that will provide $61bn in military aid, Kuleba said: “Hallelujah.” Ukraine had identified seven Patriot air defence systems it could use to protect civilians in major cities outside Kyiv. One had been obtained from Germany, while four more had been located, Kubela said, adding that two more were in his sights.
Cities such as Kharkiv, which has been repeatedly bombed this year, could “live in peace and their industrial production continue”, he said, as long as Ukraine’s allies adopted a more hard-headed approach to helping his country.
Kubela said Ukraine’s allies should switch from “expressing condolences and sympathy to Ukrainians and promising to help with recovery, to preventing loss of life and destruction of the country”.
He said the restoration of US military aid, held up for months by Republicans in a Congress aligned to Donald Trump, would not be sufficient to defeat Russia.
“No single package can stop the Russians. What will stop the Russians is a united front of all of Ukraine and all of its partners,” he said.
Kuleba added that the west needed to increase arms production, as Ukraine had done. Russia is out-shelling Ukraine by a ratio of about 10 to one, while Ukraine is running short of air defences.
“When I see what Russia achieved in building up its defence industrial base in two years of the war and what the west has achieved, I think something is wrong on the part of the west,” Kuleba said. “The west has to realise the era of peace in Europe is over.”
Russia is expected to mount a summer offensive and is thought to be in the process of mobilising an extra 100,000 soldiers.
Kubela was dismissive of those who argued that after more than two years of full-scale war it was time for Ukraine to negotiate. He said there were “200 rounds of discussions” with the Kremlin between 2014 and the 2022 invasion.
Some observers supported peace out of naivety, he said. Others were “playing for [Vladimir] Putin”. A third category “did not understand Russia” or its president. They were wrongly convinced it was necessary to negotiate with the devil, he added.
He believes Putin would only engage in meaningful talks when his military position was “close to collapse”. To get to that point, Ukraine had to pursue a twofold strategy: success on the battlefield and a coalition of countries to back President Zelenskiy’s peace formula of a Russian withdrawal, reparations and a war crimes tribunal.
Kuleba said a move to terminate consular services for Ukrainian men of fighting age living abroad was about justice at a time when “guys in the trenches are very tired”; it is unclear how many Ukrainian men would come back, but it is “unacceptable” for those outside the country to “sit down in restaurants” while others were dying.