BRUSSELS, Feb 19 (Reuters): The European Union is urgently exploring ways for its member countries to team up to buy munitions to help Ukraine, following warnings from Kyiv that its forces need more supplies quickly, diplomats and officials said.
EU foreign ministers are expected to discuss the idea of joint procurement of 155-millimetre artillery shells - badly needed by Kyiv - at a meeting in Brussels on Monday.
EU officials and diplomats say a joint approach would be more efficient than member states placing individual orders. Larger orders would also help industry invest in extra capacity, they said.
"It is now the time, really, to speed up the production, and to scale up the production of standardised products that Ukraine needs desperately," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the annual Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
Von der Leyen later said she was confident the urgency of the situation would convince EU members to set aside their longstanding preference for buying arms at national level.
"In this atrocious war that Russia unleashed against Ukraine, we see that we can move mountains under pressure," she told Reuters and other news organisations in an interview.
The joint arms buying could be similar to the EU's advance purchase of COVID vaccines, she added.
Russia's Wagner Group
suffer over 30,000
casualties in Ukraine: US
The Russian mercenary company Wagner Group has suffered more than 30,000 casualties since Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24, with about 9,000 of those fighters killed in action, the White House said on Friday.
The United States estimates that 90% of Wagner group soldiers killed in Ukraine since December were convicts, White House National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a regular briefing.
Half of the overall deaths occurred since mid-December, as fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut intensified, an NSC spokesperson said, citing newly downgraded intelligence. Kirby said mercenary group had made incremental gains in Bakhmut in and around Bakhmut over the last few days, but those had taken many months to achieve.
"It is possible that they may end up being successful in Bakhmut, but it will prove of no real worth to them because it is of no real strategic value," he said, adding that Ukrainian forces would maintain strong defensive lines across the Donbas region.
Kirby told reporters that Wagner continued to rely heavily on convicts, who were sent to war with no training or equipment, despite recent comments from Wagner's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin that he had stopped recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine.
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
