Ukraine war briefing: EU cements first ever joint arms purchases in boost for Ukraine | Ukraine

The EU has for the first time funded member states’ joint procurement of weapons, including missiles and ammunition, which will in part be sent to Ukraine. It had previously financed arms purchases for Ukraine ad hoc and from outside its budget. The European Commission vice-president Margrethe Vestager said the EU was investing €300 million to help groups of up to nine member countries buy air defence systems, armoured vehicles and artillery ammunition. “Importantly, the selected projects will also increase our support to Ukraine with additional defence equipment.” The EU has been working to boost its defence industry to arm Ukraine and build up its own forces. It fell short of a promise to supply Kyiv with a million artillery shells by the end of March 2024, but the EU diplomacy chief, Josep Borrell, has vowed the goal will be reached before the end of the year.

The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, on Thursday said he hoped Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s nominee for US secretary of state, would pursue a policy of “peace through strength”. Rubio in the past advocated an assertive US foreign policy with respect to America’s geopolitical foes, but has recently aligned more closely with Trump’s “America First” approach. In April, Rubio was one of 15 Republican senators to vote against a big military aid package to Ukraine and other US partners. In recent interviews, he has said that Ukraine should seek a negotiated settlement rather than focus on regaining its territory.

A Russian attack on Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa on Thursday hit a residential building, knocked out a heating supply boiler plant and damaged a pipeline, officials said. “Yet another terrorist act in Odesa. A strike on a residential building,” said the regional governor, Oleh Kiper. Unofficial Telegram-based news outlets posted a video of a building in flames, with firefighting equipment stationed nearby. “The enemy attack has damaged the main pipeline for heating supplies,” said the Odesa mayor, Hennadiy Trukhanov. “One of the city’s boiler plants has been forced to shut down.”

Several exiled Russian opposition figures will stage an anti-war, anti-Kremlin demonstration in Berlin this weekend. The rally is the first organised by three of the most high-profile opposition figures – Yulia Navalnaya, Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza – and comes at a critical time for the movement. Many Ukrainians feel the Russian opposition has shown ambiguity over the invasion and could do more to put pressure on Putin. Navalnaya said the rally aims to “show that a lot of Russians are against Putin and against the war … [that there is] another Russia, that is not militaristic and is free”. But in an interview with the exiled Russian TV station Dozhd, she admitted there was “no plan” among the opposition on how to end Putin’s 24-year rule.

Germany has refused to allow a Russian liquefied natural gas shipment into the Brunsbuttel terminal in northern Germany in line with Berlin’s policy not to import LNG from Russia, industry sources said on Thursday. “The cargo was destined for Brunsbuttel and someone tried its luck and it seems wanted to check how Berlin would react,” an industry source told the Reuters news agency, adding that this is “a bit of political PR stunt”. It was not clear who ordered the shipment, which left the Yamal LNG facility in Russia carried by three tankers. Germany has never directly imported Russian LNG and stopped buying Russian pipeline gas following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. It has relied on LNG from the US and elsewhere as well as pipeline gas from Norway since to replace Russian gas.

It came as Europe’s gas market rose by as much as 5% on Thursday to its highest price in a year after one of the continent’s biggest gas traders said that there could be a halt on gas supplies from Russia, Jillian Ambrose writes. Austrian gas trader OMV said a court decision awarding it compensation in a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom could lead the latter to halt supplies. Gas prices on Europe’s main gas market jumped to more than €45 a megawatt hour for the first time since November 2023 – but Europe’s gas market prices remain well below the historic highs of over €300/MWh in August 2022 after Russia’s invasion .

Nato and the EU are ramping up efforts to persuade China to help get North Korea to stop sending troops and other support to Russia to back its war on Ukraine – including by forging alliances in China’s back yard. In a blog published on Thursday, the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, detailed his recent trip to Japan and South Korea, where North Korea’s troop deployment and other assistance to Russia was on the agenda. “This marks an escalation of the utmost seriousness, which was of course at the heart of our discussions with the Japanese and South Korean leaders,” wrote Borrell, who also held talks with Blinken on Wednesday. Borrell described the new security and defence partnerships with Japan and South Korea as “the first ones outside Europe”. “The EU was certainly not born as a military alliance but, in the current geopolitical context, it can and must also become a global security provider and partner.”

A Russian military court on Thursday sentenced a woman to eight years in jail for criticising the Ukraine offensive online and calling for the assassination of President Vladimir Putin, state media reported. Moscow has opened hundreds of criminal cases against those who oppose the Ukraine war. Russia’s second western district military court found Anastasia Berezhinskaya, 43, guilty of spreading “false information”, “discrediting” the armed forces and “justifying terrorism” in a series of posts on Russian social media platform VK, said Russian state media.

Romania’s leftist prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, and the head of an opposition far-right party, George Simion, are in the lead ahead of a presidential election this month and will likely face each other in a second round runoff, an opinion poll showed on Thursday. Ciolacu strongly supports Ukraine and the country’s EU and Nato membership. Simion opposes aid to Ukraine, particularly military.

Greece said on Thursday that it would shake up its defence forces to economise funds and sideline older weapons in favour of drones after lessons drawn from Ukraine. The Greek defence minister, Nikos Dendias, said the military would introduce four different drone systems, merge army units and boost its cyberwarfare potential.