The foreign policy chief of the bloc Josep Borrell says he intends to increase military aid to Kiev to around €2 billion.
An additional 500 million military aid for Ukraine will be provided by the EU in response to the conflict between Moscow and Kiev, according to Josep Borrel, EU foreign policy chief.
He said that the new tranche, which will be the fourth provided to Kiev by the EU, will be allocated for the purchase of heavy weaponry, including armored cars, tanks and artillery, along with ammunition, and will take the bloc's total aid to Ukraine to around €2 billion euros.
Borrell told reporters that the EU needs new impetus for military support along with more pressure on Russia with economic sanctions and the international isolation of Russia and countering misinformation. The foreign policy chief hopes that the bloc will reach a consensus regarding an embargo on Russian oil in the coming days, noting that if an agreement is not reached at the level of ambassadors, the issue will be discussed during a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday.
I am sure that we will have an agreement. He said that we have to get rid of Russia's oil dependency.
The EU announced its first tranche, which was set to cover the delivery of $500 million worth of weapons to Kiev, shortly after Russia began its military operation in Ukraine in late February. The EU s decision marked a departure from the bloc's longstanding policy of not providing military assistance.
Many individual EU members have increased their military support for Kiev as Germany the EU s richest country reversed its stance on not providing Kiev with lethal weapons and increased its military spending to help Ukraine.
Kiev has repeatedly insisted that the international community should provide more financial and military support. Ukrainian officials have been demanding that NATO should establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine or provide Kiev with the means to do so themselves, such as anti-air defense systems and warplanes.
Moscow warned Western countries against pumping Ukraine with weapons, saying these actions were prolonging the conflict and making a peaceful resolution to the war impossible.
Speaking before Borrell's announcement, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the EU has gone from being a constructive economic platform to becoming an aggressive actor amid the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The EU is turning from the constructive platform that was originally meant to be an aggressive militant player that has ambitions stretching far beyond the European continent, Lavrov said at a press conference on Friday, and that the EU is looking to become nothing more than an appendage to the US-led military bloc.
Russia attacked Ukraine in late February, after Kiev failed to implement the terms of the Minsk Agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The French and German-brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.
The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists that the Russian offensive was unprovoked and has denied that it was planning to retake the two republics by force.