War for Ukraine ‘over’ unless ammunition supply speeded up, warns EU

The war for Ukraine will be over unless the EU finds a way in weeks to speed up the provision of ammunition to Ukraine, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, warned on the final day of the Munich security conference.

He said a special meeting of EU defence ministers slated for March 8th-9th will provide a chance for countries to offer ammunition from their existing stocks, adding it is taking up to 10 months for European armies to order and receive a single bullet.

“We are in urgent war mode,” he said. “This shortage of ammunition has to be solved quickly; it is a matter of weeks.” He said if it was not the war would be over.

Mr Borrell will also table plans at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday to use the existing €3.6bn European peace facility for the EU to procure ammunition jointly on the model of the procurement of vaccines during the Covid crisis, an idea first proposed by the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas.

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Elsewhere, Russia’s ambassador to the United States said on Sunday that Washington is trying to demonise Moscow and foment the crisis in Ukraine with allegations of Russian crimes against humanity.

“We regard such insinuations as an unprecedented attempt to demonise Russia in the framework of the hybrid war unleashed against us,” Ambassador Anatoly Antonov said in a statement on the Russian embassy’s Telegram messaging platform.

“There is no doubt that the purpose of such attacks by Washington is to justify its own actions to fuel the Ukrainian crisis.”

Organisations supported by the US Agency for International Development have documented more than 30,000 war crimes incidents since the invasion, according to the US government. Ukrainian officials said they were investigating the Thursday shelling of the city of Bakhmut as a possible war crime.

The UN-backed Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine says it has identified war crimes but has not concluded whether they amount to crimes against humanity.

Friday will mark a year since Russia launched what it calls “a special military operation” to “denazify” and “demilitarise” its neighbour.

The Kremlin has intensified operations across a broad swath of southern and eastern Ukraine, and a major new offensive has been widely anticipated.

The United States and its allies have provide Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated arms, including modern battle tanks, and western leaders have discussed more aid at a series of meetings in Europe in recent days.

Elsewhere, western leaders have reacted nervously to a Chinese peace plan for Ukraine due to be revealed this week but cautiously welcomed the move as a first sign that China recognises the war cannot be regarded solely as a European affair.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, China’s senior diplomat Wang Yi, one of the few external politicians able to influence Russia, announced that China would launch its peace initiative on the anniversary of the war, and has already been consulting Germany, Italy and France on its proposals.

He said the peace plan would underscore the need to uphold the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the UN Charter. But at the same time he said the legitimate security interests of Russia needed to be respected.

Diplomats who have been briefed by China are unclear how specific Beijing intends to be or whether the plan will lapse into vacuities about peaceful solutions that are sometimes a feature of Chinese diplomacy. – Agencies