Poland, Sweden Warn Europe of War with Russia

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

WARSAW/STOCKHOLM/KYIV (Worthy News) – Poland and Sweden have warned Europe to prepare for war with Russia and said that nobody should feel safe if Moscow defeats Ukraine.

Their warnings came after Ukraine’s air force announced Friday it had shot down 58 drones and 26 missiles, while Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said energy infrastructure had been damaged in six regions.

Ukraine’s national energy company has announced emergency blackouts in the west, center, and east of the country due to “massive Russian attack on Ukrainian power plants overnight.”

Power provider Ukrenergo said the measures occur in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kirovograd, and it urged consumers to limit electricity use.

It came as Ukraine’s newly appointed commander-in-chief, Gen Oleksandr Syrskiy, admitted in a rare interview that Russia was outgunning Ukrainian forces “about six to one” on the front line.

“The defense forces are now performing tasks along the entire vast front line, with little or no weapons and ammunition,” he warned in an interview with the Ukrinform news agency.

General Syrskyi said Ukraine had lost territory it would “undoubtedly have retained” with “a sufficient number of air defense systems and artillery shells” and said the country hoped to receive more Western missiles soon.

EXPRESSING CONCERN

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk expressed concern about the attacks, saying that if Russia defeats Ukraine, nobody in Europe will be able to feel safe. “I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past,” he told European media. “It’s real, and it started over two years ago” when Russia’s military invaded Ukraine.

Tusk, a former president of the European Union’s decision-making European Council, said Russian President Vladimir Putin had already blamed Ukraine for the recent Islamic on the Crocus City Hall near Moscow that killed at least 137 people. He said Putin “evidently feels the need to justify increasingly violent attacks on civil targets in Ukraine” with false accusations.

He noted that Russia had attacked Kyiv, the capital, with hypersonic missiles in daylight for the first time earlier this week.

As attacks intensified, Tusk recalled a photo on the wall of his family home in Poland that showed people laughing on a beach at Sopot, near Gdansk, where he was born, on the southern Baltic coast.

The image was from 31 August 1939, he said. Then, a dozen hours later and 5 kilometers (three miles) away, World War Two began. “I know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger generation, but we have to mentally get used to the arrival of a new era. The pre-war era,” he warned.

Regardless of whether Joe Biden or Donald J. Trump won November’s U.S. presidential election, he argued Europe would become a more attractive partner to Washington if it became more self-sufficient militarily.

Poland now spent 4 percent of its economic output on defense, and every other European country should spend 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product with the European Union mentally prepared to fight for its security, Tusk explained.

RUSSIA AGGRESSION

Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström agreed, saying NATO countries should seek to create more strategic difficulties to stop Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

“We have to understand that Russia is a neighbor that is behaving irresponsibly, which is threatening the world with irresponsible nuclear threats and the idea of recreating its former empire at the expense of independent sovereign states (…) We have to put an end to that. We have to create more strategic difficulties for Russia,” Billström said.

The minister argued that stopping Russia’s aggression against Ukraine must be the top priority but noticed that NATO is not doing enough in this regard.

The Swedish minister’s comments echoed statements by French President Emmanuel Macron, who pushed for “strategic ambiguity” towards Russia. He hinted at the possibility of deploying (more) Western troops to Ukraine, which caused a stir among allies.

Billström said Macron’s idea would be too bold for Sweden, which has just joined NATO in March, but he made clear his country is preparing for war.

However, the Swedish foreign minister claimed that “not all countries understand the sense of urgency” to halt Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

Yet an increasing number of countries move towards a war economy, spending billions of euros on defense after what critics view as years of dreaming that the Cold War was over.

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