Tusk calls on EU to prepare own plan for security, Ukraine
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has appealed to the European Union to urgently prepare its own action plan concerning Ukraine and the continent's security.
"Europe urgently needs its own plan of action concerning Ukraine and our security, or else other global players will decide about our future. Not necessarily in line with our own interest. This plan must be prepared now. There’s no time to lose," Tusk wrote on the X platform on Saturday.
The call comes on the second day of the Munich Security Conference, a high-profile gathering held since 1963, as the US foreign policy is undergoing a serious remodelling under US President Donald Trump.
Trump shocked the world on Wednesday by holding a 90-minute-long telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the first such talks between the US and Russian presidents since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This has alarmed many Western leaders who see it as inviting the Russian strongman back to the international community. Putin has been shunned by most Western countries for three years and is wanted by the International Criminal Court over Russia's suspected war crimes in Ukraine.
Trump's conversation with Putin was followed by a telephone talk with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
To the astonishment of Ukraine and its allies, Trump has been suggesting, also through his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, that the end of the conflict would require Kyiv to give up some of its territory that Russia currently occupies, while also questioning the likelihood of Ukraine ever becoming a NATO member.
On Friday, US Vice President JD Vance chilled the audience at the Munich Security Conference by launching an indiscriminate attack against a number of European nations, criticising them for what he called a departure from their own values, censorship, ill-conceived migration policies, ignoring voters and persecuting Christians. Ignoring the subject of the conference and the delegates' expectations concerning an outline of the US security policy under the new US administration, Vance instead devoted most of his speech to the criticism of European democracy. (PAP)
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