It is evident that the one in Ukraine "is not an internal conflict but a clash with Russia". The German Chancellor said so Angela Merkel to the Bundestag, reiterating that "there will be no military solution to the conflict" and that the EU is "preparing substantial new sanctions".
In Brussels, Merkel was even clearer: despite the efforts made to keep diplomatic channels open, Putin has broken his promises and “is moving towards military escalation. Now there are no more limits to his unpredictability ”, because he acts driven by nationalism, by the hunger for internal consensus, and after Ukraine it could be Latvia and Estonia's turn.
Words shared by the Polish premier and new president of the EU Council, Donald Tusk, who condemned a certain "naive optimism" and, speaking in Gdansk on the occasion of a commemoration of the German attack on Poland, issued a warning: "September 1939 must not be repeated in Ukraine. We Europeans must learn from the tragic Polish September and from the years of the Second World War".
Russia, for its part, is trying to throw water on the fire. The foreign minister Sergey Lavrov he assured that the Kremlin does not want war: “There will be no Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Moscow is for an exclusively peaceful solution to this very serious crisis. We invite you to sit down and discuss, instead of threatening sanctions. In any case, Russia will not slam the door in the event of new Western sanctions and will not leave the WTO".
However, the outgoing president of the EU Commission, Josè Manuel Barroso, has disclosed an alarming sentence pronounced by Putin: “If I want – said the Russian President – I can take Kiev in two weeks”.
