{"id":42047,"date":"2024-03-31T01:20:50","date_gmt":"2024-03-31T01:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/?p=42047"},"modified":"2024-03-31T01:20:52","modified_gmt":"2024-03-31T01:20:52","slug":"europe-must-get-ready-for-looming-war-donald-tusk-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/2024\/03\/31\/europe-must-get-ready-for-looming-war-donald-tusk-warns\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe must get ready for looming war, Donald Tusk warns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Polish prime minister,\u00a0Donald Tusk, says Europe is entering a \u201cprewar\u201d era, cautioning that the continent is not ready and urging European countries to step up defence investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with a group of European newspapers\u00a0reported by the BBC, Tusk said: \u201cI don\u2019t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past. It\u2019s real and it started over two years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tusk\u2019s comments came days after a Russian missile briefly\u00a0breached\u00a0Polish airspace during a major attack on Ukraine, prompting Warsaw to put its forces on heightened readiness. Ukrainian officials have said large-scale Russian missile and drone attacks had targeted energy infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tusk has been using his platform to try to add a sense of urgency to Europe\u2019s debates about defence and aid to\u00a0Ukraine, amid fears about the future of American assistance and concerns about defence industrial capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTrue solidarity with Ukraine? Less words, more ammunition,\u201d he\u00a0wrote\u00a0on social media earlier this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another\u00a0post, he addressed Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives. \u201cHow many more arguments do you need to take a decision?\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Simon<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Polish prime minister said that regardless of the outcome of the US election this year,\u00a0Europe\u00a0would become a more attractive partner for Washington if it became more self-sufficient militarily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He called for urgent assistance for Kyiv, saying the next two years of the war would decide everything and that \u201cwe are living in the most critical moment since the end of the second world war\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was most worrying was that \u201cliterally any scenario is possible,\u201d Tusk said. \u201cI 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 prewar era,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He added that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had blamed Kyiv for the attack on Moscow\u2019s Crocus City Hall without any evidence and \u201cevidently feels the need to justify increasingly violent attacks on civil targets in Ukraine\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tusk, who was prime minister between 2007 and 2014 and returned to office in December, is a veteran politician who has previously served as president of the European Council and leader of the centre-right European People\u2019s party. He has sought to improve Warsaw\u2019s standing in the EU and the transatlantic alliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent social media post, he\u00a0wrote: \u201cThe postwar epoch is gone. We are living in new times: in a prewar epoch. This is why Nato and solidarity between Europe and America are more important than ever before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his comments this week, Tusk underscored the importance of cooperation between\u00a0Poland, Germany and France, a format known as the Weimar Triangle. While there have been tensions in the past months between Warsaw and Kyiv over Ukrainian food imports, he has worked to try to smooth over differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEven the closest of friends have conflicting interests and viewpoints at times,\u201d the Polish leader said in a\u00a0press conference\u00a0this week alongside his Ukrainian counterpart. The discussions ended \u201cwith an even deeper conviction that no force in the world, neither in Ukraine nor Poland, could undermine their friendship\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Polish prime minister,\u00a0Donald Tusk, says Europe is entering a \u201cprewar\u201d era, cautioning that the continent is not ready and urging European countries to step up defence investment. In an interview with a group of European newspapers\u00a0reported by the BBC, Tusk said: \u201cI don\u2019t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":42048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[6850,6728,9747,5304,11394,2735,9331,9560,351,9506,911,5494,159,6621,9505,3182,6496,5575,6225,3577,66,8995,11493,9343,5342,10795,5254,5340,4802,8386,837,3805,3174,71,5217,5349,9277,5180,5555,6348,694,5251,10395,2354,36,594],"class_list":["post-42047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-aid","tag-alliance","tag-ammunition","tag-attack","tag-attacks","tag-bbc","tag-city","tag-conviction","tag-donald-tusk","tag-drone","tag-election","tag-energy","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-council","tag-food","tag-france","tag-friends","tag-future","tag-germany","tag-infrastructure","tag-interview","tag-investment","tag-kyiv","tag-mike-johnson","tag-missile","tag-moscow","tag-nato","tag-platform","tag-poland","tag-president","tag-prime-minister","tag-putin","tag-russian","tag-social-media","tag-speaker","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian","tag-us","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-war","tag-warsaw","tag-washington","tag-world","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42049,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42047\/revisions\/42049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}