Merz said that Russia\u2019s latest actions were \u2018anything but a proportionate response to the very precise Ukrainian attacks on military airfields and infrastructure in the last week\u2019read more<\/p>\n
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday slammed Russian \u201cterror against the civilian population\u201d in Ukraine after Moscow escalated its bombardments there.<\/p>\n
Speaking at a press conference with his Dutch counterpart Dick Schoof, Merz called the recent Russian attacks \u201cthe most serious war crimes\u201d and said Russia had \u201cattacked no military targets but the civilian population\u201d.<\/p>\n
Merz said that Russia\u2019s latest actions were \u201canything but a proportionate response to the very precise Ukrainian attacks on military airfields and infrastructure in the last week\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u201cRussia wanted to create a bloodbath and the fact that this only happened in a limited way is thanks to effective Ukrainian defence,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Merz\u2019s comments come ahead of a G7 summit in Canada on June 15-17 and a NATO meeting later in the month, where allies will push US President Donald Trump to be more aggressive in punishing the Kremlin.<\/p>\n
On the question of new sanctions on Russia from the European Union, Merz said he had been in touch with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen in recent days \u201cand I encourage her to introduce this new round quickly\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be further sanctions on the banking sector, in the energy sector,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Merz said that while Kyiv\u2019s allies were \u201cready for negotiations at any time, if negotiations are refused \u2013 and they are being refused on the Russian side\u201d, then the response must be \u201cmilitary strength and massive economic pressure\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Merz said that Russia\u2019s latest actions were \u2018anything but a proportionate response to the very precise Ukrainian attacks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[71954,2000,299,1824,34115,332,71953,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-173674","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-civilians","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-germany","12":"tag-merz","13":"tag-russia","14":"tag-russian-attack-on-ukraine","15":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114660633776641586","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}