NATO members pledged on Wednesday, December 3rd, to buy hundreds of millions more dollars worth of U.S. arms for Ukraine, telling Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to end his “bluster” and get serious about peace talks.
Foreign ministers from the 32-nation alliance gathered in Brussels to discuss Washington’s push to end the fighting—but with top U.S. diplomat Marco Rubio skipping the meeting. The gathering comes after U.S. envoys apparently failed to make a major breakthrough on stopping the war in five hours of talks with Putin in Moscow.
According to NATO chief Mark Rutte,
The peace talks are ongoing, that’s good, but at the same time, we have to make sure that whilst they take place—and we are not sure when they will end—that Ukraine is in the strongest possible position to keep the fight going.
As part of those moves Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland together committed some $1 billion more to a scheme buying American weapons for Ukraine.
A string of ministers said that Putin did not appear so far to be willing to make any concessions at talks with Washington’s representatives. They also pushed back against comments from the Russian president that he did not want conflict with Europe, but was “ready” for war.
“It’s the rhetoric that Russia is making use of in order to intimidate us, and we shouldn’t take such talk too seriously,” said Finnish foreign minister Elina Valtonen:
We have very strong capabilities as NATO, as Europe, and we are ramping up by the day.
It looks as if many European leaders are continuing with the ingrained bad habit of underestimating Russia.
