Zelensky urges Slovak PM to cut Russian oil imports

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico to cut off oil supplies from Russia, which uses the export revenues to fuel its three-and-a-half year-old war. The European Union has banned most imports of oil from Russia in response to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, but Slovakia and Hungary have been exempted from the embargo to give them time to find alternative supplies.
This has led to friction between Bratislava and Kyiv, which hosts a stretch of the Druzhba pipeline carrying Russian oil to the two landlocked EU countries. 'Russian oil, like Russian gas, has no future,' Zelensky said, during a joint press conference with Fico. He added that, while Ukraine will continue striking Russian energy infrastructure, 'no one is going to just sit in the dark'.
Fico, who met Russian President Vladimir Putin in China earlier this week, was meeting Zelensky, whom he regularly criticises, in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhgorod, close to Slovakia and Hungary. The Slovak PM said he saw a quick end to the war, but admitted that he and Zelensky had 'different opinions' on that. Fico also said he could forsee a normalisation of relations with Russia, 'we are simply saying in advance what the possibilities are, where we will start talking again, what tasks we will do together'.
Earlier, the United States is to end long-running military assistance for European countries close to Russia, as it pushes the continent to play a greater role in its own defence, an official in one of the countries confirmed on Friday. 'Last week, the US Defense Department informed the countries that, starting from its next financial period, funding will be reduced to zero,' the defence policy director in Lithuania's defence ministry, Vaidotas Urbelis, told reporters.
The decision comes as US President Donald Trump struggles to end Moscow's three-and-a-half-year attack of Ukraine.
Urbelis confirmed reports in The Washington Post and The Financial Times citing unnamed officials saying the move was part of Trump's efforts to cut US expenditure abroad. The FT said US officials had told European diplomats last week that Washington would no longer fund programmes to train and equip eastern European militaries along Russia's border. The Washington Post said the funding to be cut was worth several hundreds of millions of dollars.
In Lithuania's case, the cuts would impact 'the purchase of US weapons and other equipment, and training', Urbelis said. He added that it 'will not have an impact on the US troop presence in the region', which was funded through a separate US budget allocation. A White House official said the move hewed to a January executive order Trump had signed that reevaluated US foreign aid. 'This action has been coordinated with European countries in line with the executive order and the president's longstanding emphasis on ensuring Europe takes more responsibility for its own defence,' the official said on condition of anonymity.
Trump has long been sceptical of both US defence spending in Europe and aid for Ukraine, pushing some of Washington's closest allies to play a greater role on both fronts. The Lithuanian defence ministry official said that the US funding for training and equipping its military covered between a third and 80 per cent of total military aid received by the country. Estonia's Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur told the Postimees daily that he viewed the US move as 'especially symbolic, in a negative way'.
Meanwhile, seizing Russian central bank assets immobilised in the 27-nation EU over the Ukraine war risks inflicting major damage on Europe's economy, Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said. The EU froze some 200 billion euros of Russian central bank assets after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the vast majority of which are held by the international deposit organisation Euroclear in Belgium.
'For Belgium, confiscating Russian sovereign assets is not an option,' Prevot said in an interview at his Brussels office. 'Such a confiscation, motivated by a political decision rather than a legal or judicial one, would be likely to cause a terrible systemic shock across all European financial markets, deal a severe blow to the credibility of the euro, and thus have very problematic domino effects.'
Last year the European Union — along with its G7 partners — used the interest being earned on the assets to back a $50 billion loan to Ukraine that is still being paid out in instalments. But there is pressure from a number of more hawkish EU states to do more to make use of the assets -- with mooted options including confiscating them outright or seeking greater profits by ploughing them into riskier investments. — AFP