The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is confident he and the US president-elect, Donald Trump, will be able to develop a “joint strategy” for Ukraine after speaking to him on the phone, he said in an interview published on Saturday. “I am confident that we can develop a joint strategy for Ukraine. My guiding principle remains that nothing can be decided without giving the Ukrainian people a say,” Scholz told the Funke media group. He added he had spoken with the future US president “in detail” and that his team was in a direct exchange with Trump’s security advisers. “What is important is that the killing ends soon and that Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty are guaranteed,” he said.
Scholz, however, again ruled out sending long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine, which are made in Germany and sought after by Kyiv. The weapons, which could be used to hit targets in Russia, risked an escalation that “must be avoided”, Scholz, who is facing a snap election in February, said in the interview. Friedrich Merz, the conservative opposition leader who is on course to unseat Scholz, has said Germany should send Taurus cruise missiles.
Russian attacks on the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Kryvyi Rih in south-eastern Ukraine on Friday killed at least 12 people and wounded more than 40, regional officials said. A strike on a car repair shop in Zaporizhzhia turned the facility into a giant fireball and killed 10 people, the regional governor said. Media quoted a local official as saying 24 people were injured, including two children. In Kryvyi Rih, a missile strike on an administrative building killed two people. At least 19 others, including a child, were injured, emergency services said, adding that residential houses were also damaged.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy slammed Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, over the two attacks. “Thousands of such strikes carried out by Russia during this war make it absolutely clear that Putin does not need real peace,” Zelensky said in a post on Telegram. “Only by force can we resist this. And only through force can real peace be established.”
The Ukrainian president could use his trip to Paris on Saturday to hold talks with Trump, diplomatic sources have told Reuters. There were efforts to arrange the meeting between Zelenskyy and the incoming US president, who will both be attending the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The plans would probably not come together until the last minute and any talks would be discreet, the sources added. A Ukrainian delegation met in Washington on Wednesday with Trump’s choice for White House national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and his Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg.
The European Union needs a “big bang” of spending and policy changes to ramp up its defences in the face of the threat posed by Russia, the bloc’s new defence chief, Andrius Kubilius, has said. “We need to move from what some people are calling incremental improvement of our defence capabilities to some kind of big bang approach,” the former Lithuanian prime minister said, reiterating that Europe needs to invest an additional €500bn ($530bn) on defence over the next decade.
Kubilius insisted that the real reason Europe needed to step up was the menace of Putin, not the incoming US president. Trump has threatened Washington’s commitment to help protect its allies in Europe and cast doubt on maintaining US support for Ukraine. But Kubilius said that Europe’s industry needed to be able to sustain a “long-term war”.
Russia could deploy its new Oreshnik intermediate-range hypersonic missile in Belarus in the second half of next year, Putin has said after the Russian president signed a mutual defence pact with his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, at a summit in Minsk. “I think this will become possible in the second half of next year, as serial production of these systems in Russia increases and as these missile systems enter service with the Russian strategic forces,” Putin said. Russia fired the Oreshnik at a Ukrainian city last month in what Putin described as a first test of the weapon in combat conditions.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
