Sept 8 (Reuters) – Germany will send Patriot air defence missiles to Ukraine from its national stocks, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on \u200cTuesday, warning that Russia was likely to intensify its air campaign \u200cagainst Ukrainian infrastructure as winter approaches.<\/p>\n
Speaking at a videoconference of nations supporting Ukraine, Pistorius said \u200bhe had decided to “deliver urgently” additional PAC-2 interceptor missiles.<\/p>\n
Patriot missiles are currently the only effective defence against Russian ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine, officials say.<\/p>\n
“Since Russia is only advancing very slowly at the front line, it is trying to destroy \u200cUkraine’s economic base and \u2060critical infrastructure by way of air raids on port installations, power plants, and other civilian targets,” Pistorius said.<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, we can \u2060expect Russian air raids to increase again once temperatures drop, and then the damage will be even greater,” he told the meeting of the Ukraine Defence \u200bContact \u200bGroup.<\/p>\n
Pistorius did not say how many missiles \u200bGermany would provide.<\/p>\n
He said Germany \u200cwould also expand deliveries of air-to-air missiles and continue supplying drones and long-range ammunition to Kyiv.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian Defence Minister Yevhenii Khmara said Kyiv is contracting to buy around 1,000 Patriot missiles but most would only be shipped in the coming years. He urged allies to dig into their stocks for \u200cUkraine now, on the basis that Kyiv would \u200breplace those missiles from future deliveries.<\/p>\n
NATO Secretary \u200bGeneral Mark Rutte also pressed \u200ballies to increase support, saying civilian casualties from the \u200cwar were at their highest level since \u200bMay 2022.<\/p>\n
“Nations must \u200bdig deeper. We do not have a choice,” he said.<\/p>\n
Ahead of the meeting, Rutte and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said \u200bEU members states \u200chad agreed to use part of a \u20ac90-billion ($105 billion) EU loan to \u200ballow Ukraine to buy crucial supplies for Patriot systems.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8603 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bBart Meijer; Editing by Andrew Gray)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sept 8 (Reuters) – Germany will send Patriot air defence missiles to Ukraine from its national stocks, Defence…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[13502,9784,351,6303,12655,3773,6312,26,37],"class_list":["post-39281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-against-ukrainian","tag-boris-pistorius","tag-defence","tag-patriot","tag-pistorius","tag-reuters","tag-rutte","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}