the times | Saturday April 9 2022 2GM 9News
Boris Johnson has accused President
Putin of war crimes and announced
that Britain will send a further £100 mil-
lion of military aid, including anti-tank
and anti-aircraft missiles, to Ukraine.
The prime minister and Olaf Scholz,
the German chancellor, used a Down-
ing Street press conference to make the
charge against the Russian president.
Johnson said they shared “the same
sense of horror and revulsion” at the
attack on a railway station in
Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, adding
that it “shows the depths to which
Putin’s once-vaunted army had sunk”.
Scholz said: “Killing civilians is a war
crime. The Russian president bears
responsibility for war crimes. Boris
Johnson and I share this assessment.”
Asked about the risk of escalating the
conflict, Johnson said Putin had already
done so by targeting civilians. He said:
“He has inflicted systematic slaughter
on innocent people. What we’re now
looking at doing is finding ways to
support friends and partners who want
to send other types of equipment that
may be useful to the Ukrainians.”
He suggested that some Nato mili-
tary equipment would not be helpful,
saying the focus should be on equip-
ment “genuinely useful” to Ukraine.
He criticised talks between President
Macron and Putin, saying: “Negotiat-
ing with Putin does not seem to me to
be full of promise. I don’t feel he can be
trusted. I am deeply sceptical — I’m
afraid cynical — about his assurances.”
Johnson said Germany had a “mas-
sive dependency” on Russian oil and
gas but was “moving away very, very
fast”. Scholz said it was “not that easy”
to reduce dependency but his country
was building the infrastructure for
alternatives, including wind power and
terminals for liquefied natural gas.
European Union division on energy
sanctions will erupt next week when
the bloc is due to debate banning Rus-
sian oil, potentially ending members’
reliance on Moscow for fossil fuels. A
reduction or moratorium would hit
Russia hard: the trade has raised
€9 billion since the Ukraine conflict
began, some €700 million more than
the value of gas sales over the period.
Yesterday’s EU ban on coal imports,
tabled on Tuesday after the war crime
reports from Bucha, will take effect in
120 days, a delay forced by Germany and
others to soften the impact on industry.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign
minister, urged the EU to hasten sanc-
tions on oil and gas imports that were
“supporting the Russian war machine”.
“The damage being inflicted on
Russia by sanctions has medium and
long-term implications but people are
dying today. We need steps that will
stop Russia’s war machine today,” he
said. “How many Buchas have to take
place for you to impose sanctions?”
In a mark of how difficult energy ne-
gotiations will be, the coal ban was de-
layed an extra 30 days to allow industry,
particularly metal smelters to find new
supplies of high-quality anthracite.
Oil will be more difficult to negotiate
and any ban is unlikely until the end of
year at the earliest, following
Germany’s timetable for halting
Russian supplies.Victims of yesterday’s
missile strike on the train
station in Kramatorsk, in
Donetsk region, which killed
at least 50 people and
wounded dozens more. The
weapon had “For children”
painted on its sidedozens dead in strike on station
News
UK giving £100m
more in lethal aid
Steven Swinford Political Editor
Bruno Waterfield BrusselsAnalysis
O
laf Scholz’s war in the
east began with the
modest offer of 5,
helmets for the
Ukrainian army,
progressed to the supply of anti-
tank weapons and has reached
the point where he is almost
ready to deliver some lightweight
tanks if he can work out a way of
getting them to Donbas (Roger
Boyes writes).
That is quite an odyssey. The
result: for the first time in
decades a German leader has
come to No 10 as a (reluctant)
co-combatant. Germany has
finally woken up to the toxicity of
its dealings with President Putin.
The German chancellor’s ruling
coalition of Social Democrats
(SPD) and Greens, flanked by the
Free Democrats, should
historically be pacifist to its
bones. The SPD opposed
rearmament and the formation
of the Bundeswehr in 1955. The
Greens gained a mass following
among young Germans in the
1980s by opposing the stationing
of US cruise missiles in West
Germany. And the Free
Democrats, a pro-business party,
favoured stable trading relations
with the Soviet Union and
Russia.
The war in Ukraine has created
two competing narratives. One,
frequently heard on German TV
channels, is that sanctions on
Russia risk punishing Germany
rather than Putin.
Talk shows focus on the steep
drop in GDP if Germany joined a
western embargo of Russian coal,
oil and gas. The other narrative
centres on the moral indignation
that German payments for
Russian energy essentially
bankroll a war of atrocities.
Scholz, a cautious former
finance minister, is being swayed
at last by the second argument.
Opinion polls are heading in that
direction, too. Support for an
immediate boycott of Russian gas
and oil went up six percentage
points to 50 per cent, according
to Infratest dimap pollsters in a
survey carried out before the
Bucha atrocities were revealed.
That gives Scholz a chance to
become his own man. How he
weathers this crisis depends on
two factors. First, he has to
demonstrate that while Germany
can drop Russian coal and find
other sources of crude oil, a gas
embargo is more complex.
Second, Germany can offer
military hardware but only with
trusted allies such as Britain or
Poland. Sophisticated kit such as
the Marder light tank needs
drivers and mechanics to be
trained on their use. It needs
spare parts and to be safely
delivered to the east. That
demands a multi-nation effort.
The German chancellor is willing
to step up, but not stand alone.FADEL SENNA AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ANDRIY ANDRIYENKO AP; ANDREA CARRUBBA ANADOLU AGENCYCytxy tyux tuyxt uyxt
uyxt yutx tyuxtyuxt
uy txuy xyu
tyucyucyucuVi i f d ’