The Polish Prime Minister Donal Tusk will hold a meeting with the British Prime Minister to continue to help Ukraine as Donald Trump is due to take to the White House in January.
There are fears Trump will force Ukraine to give up their territory to Vladimir Putin to end the war and Kyiv was told over the weekend “Crimea is gone.”
Tusk will hold talks with Keir Starmer, the French President Emmanuel Macron and the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, The Times reports.
Starmer is currently in Paris meeting with the French President in an attempt to persuade the US to allow Ukrainian forces to use long-range missiles to attack “legitimate” military targets deep inside Russia, before Trump enters the White House, the Telegraph reports.
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Starmer and Macron have one last attempt to persuade President Joe Biden to allow Ukraine to use Western missiles to attack Russia, but Biden is more risk adverse and could dither on making a firm decision over fears that Moscow will react.
Citing a UK government source the Telegraph reports, “We are very keen to make sure we can make the most of the time between now and Jan. 20 (Trump takes office) and not just put everything on hold until the next administration.”
The fear has always been that should the UK allow the Storm Shadow cruise missiles to be used inside Russia then this could push Putin striking NATO bases which would automatically trigger Article 5 pushing the alliance into a direct war with Russia.
The outgoing chief of NATO’s Military Committee Admiral Rob Bauer said on Sunday that if Russia did not have nuclear weapons “we would have been in Ukraine” fighting.
Admiral Bauer said, “I am absolutely sure if the Russians did not have nuclear weapons, we would have been in Ukraine, kicking them out.”
In late February 2022 Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear deterrence forces to be on high alert and the risk of nuclear conflict has now become “considerable,” the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov previously warned.
In March Putin announced that the Russian military is “ready” for a nuclear war, leaving the secretary general of the United Nations, Antonie Guterres warning the idea of nuclear was “once unthinkable” but is now a “subject of debate,” Newsweek reported.
Guterres added, “This in itself is totally unacceptable.”
