Italy may have to contribute $3 billion to fund the war in Ukraine. Corriere della Sera writes it today in an article by Giuseppe Sarcina telling of the $33 billion monstre allotment demanded by Joe Biden in Congress. “It is important that my request for funding is approved as soon as possible,” the President wrote yesterday Twitter. The alternative, he added, is to support the Ukrainian people while they defend their country, or “look on while the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression.”
Money for Kyiv
While the Pentagon has cut the delivery time of arms to Kyiv to just three days, President and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have begun calling on allies like the UK, France, Germany and Italy to do their part. Such as? By providing Kyiv with a sum “proportional” to the American one. That is in relation to the gross domestic product of the respective country. From this perspective, the newspaper explains, the bill for Italy should amount to 3 billion dollars. A number that is very difficult to maintain from an economic and political point of view, given the incipient splits in the coalition supporting the Draghi government.
However, Europe is preparing to impose the embargo on Russian oil. And that in itself could be considered a major effort to contribute to the war. The topic of the “European contribution”, the newspaper concludes, will be the focus of the summit between Biden and Draghi planned for May 10 in Washington. The Europeans’ appeal for donations is part of the West’s shift in support for Ukraine. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Monday: “We want Russia to be weakened enough that it can no longer do things like invade Ukraine. Moscow has already lost a lot of its military capabilities and many troops, to be honest, and we don’t want them to be able to build those capabilities back up quickly.
The second phase of the war
A situation defined by Florent Parmentier, an international relations expert at Sciences-Po University in Paris, as the “second phase” of the war. “There was a first phase where we were simply questioning the Ukrainians’ ability to resist Russia… (now) there is more and more talk of encouraging Ukraine on its way to victory,” he added. While the New York Times wrote yesterday that the US is spending more on Ukraine than on financing its war in Afghanistan with the extraordinary increase in military aid to Kyiv.
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