Merkel says Russian aggression against Ukraine should lead to EU sanctions

Merkel says Russian aggression against Ukraine should lead to EU sanctions

/ Europe

















Issued on: 25/11/2021 - 19:51





















Chancellor Angela Merkel met with her Polish counterpart in Berlin on Thursday, November 25, 2021. © John MacDougall, AP











The European Union must be prepared to enact more sanctions against Russia if the situation in and around eastern Ukraine or on the Belarus-Poland border escalates, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.









Merkel spoke both with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland on Thursday.

Both Russia and Ukraine staged military drills this week after weeks of rising tensions between Kyiv and Moscow, while thousands of migrants from the Middle East and other hotspots are stranded on the European Union’s eastern border, in what the bloc says is a crisis engineered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

In her conversation with Zelenskiy, the outgoing German leader expressed her support and noted that any attempt to undermine Ukraine’s independence “would not go without consequences” but that defusing the situation should always be the preferred option, her spokesperson Steffen Seibert said