The European Union mustn’t let up in its efforts to help Ukraine resist Russia, according to Polish Finance Minister Andrzej Domanski.
“We definitely need to put further pressure on Russia,” he told reporters on Tuesday in Brussels, where he’s hosting a meeting of his EU peers. “We’ll discuss sanctions also today. We see that sanctions work. We see that the Russian economy is getting weaker and weaker.”
Europe is continuing to support Ukraine while dealing with US President Donald Trump’s increasingly antagonistic rhetoric and threats to water down America’s security commitment to the continent. That has woken up policymakers to the dire nature of the challenge the bloc faces as well as the need to move quickly.
“We will of course focus on fiscal rules and how to enable countries that want to spend more on defense, on our security, how to enable them to spend more within the fiscal rules,” Domanski said.
Asked about the best means to boost Europe’s capacities, he didn’t commit to any single idea, instead saying that “there are plenty of proposals on the table.”
“We are ready to discuss all of them as we believe there is no single tool that will work,” he said. “We need to find multiple solutions and some solutions will be suitable for particular countries. We do believe that the time to act is now. We need to build a strong European defense industry and we need to secure financing for this huge rearmament that’s needed in Europe.”
His Finnish counterpart, Riikka Purra, agreed, saying that “at the moment our immediate need is to secure a strong negotiation position for Ukraine to ensure a just and lasting peace.”
“To achieve this we need to continue to tighten the sanctions to make them bite even more and at the moment we need to go ahead and confiscate the assets to secure a strong position to negotiate peace,” she said.
Not everyone is on board with the idea of seizing Russian assets. Austria’s new finance chief, Markus Marterbauer, urged caution.
“I think that confiscation would be nearly a new path and we have to discuss that at the European level,” he said, adding that “there should be broad consensus on this question and no majority decision.”
With assistance from Kamil Kowalcze.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
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