Polish prime minister Donald Tusk has said that Ukraine is ready to fight for another three years, but hopes the war will not last longer.
Poland’s leader revealed that Kyiv was anxious about the toll the war could take on its population and economy should it stretch on for longer than a few more years.
“I have no doubts Ukraine will survive as an independent state,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “Now the main question is how many victims we will see. President Zelensky told me [on Thursday] that he hopes that the war will not last ten years, but that Ukraine is ready to fight for another two, three years.”
As well as impacting Ukraine’s economy, Moscow’s finances have not remained unscathed with a siege of international sanctions from the US, UK and Europe. But as he spoke to the Sunday newspaper, Mr Tusk issued a stark warning to the UK about how they are not so removed from the war.
Reflecting on the British public’s muted response to news that Sir Keir Starmer’s former family home in Kentish Town had been targeted by Russia-linked arson attacks, he warned the UK could not live under a “sweet illusion” that it would be spared in the event of a Nato-Russia war.
“The problem is that no one in Britain was [taken aback] by this. I was shocked, frankly speaking,” Mr Tusk said. “After information about it appeared in the British press, the reaction was like it was just an Arsenal-Liverpool football match. But if the Russians are ready and able to organise something like that, it means that they are ready and able to do anything.”
He warned that if Moscow were to deploy its new hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missiles to either Belarus or Kaliningrad, it would be easily capable of unleashing a nuclear warhead at any European capital including London – as the missiles have a range of up to 2,000 miles.
“The threat is global and universal, above all because of technology,” the Polish premier said. “You and we are both already under massive attack in cyberspace. In Poland they are ready to destroy the cyberinfrastructure [underpinning] our railways, our hospitals. It could be really painful. This is why you can’t live under this sweet illusion that you are too far away from them, that it’s not your war, it’s just Ukraine or Poland.”
Poland has remained a close ally to Ukraine during its three and a half year-long war with Russia, but even before then, Mr Tusk was a staunch critic of Putin when he was President of the European Council between 2014 and 2019.
He said of Russia’s president: “Don’t believe that Putin is some kind of extraordinary personality or a magician, or magnetic, or charismatic.
“He’s an extremely ordinary and simple person. The conversations with him are not interesting. [He has] a very simple way of thinking, and it’s always about who has more power and who is ready to use the power against each other.”
