Europe must get ready for looming war, Donald Tusk warns

Polish prime minister urges countries to step up defence spending after Russian missile bound for Ukraine breaches airspace

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, says Europe is entering a “prewar” era, cautioning that the continent is not ready and urging European countries to step up defence investment.

In an interview with a group of European newspapers reported by the BBC, Tusk said: “I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past. It’s real and it started over two years ago.”

Tusk’s comments came days after a Russian missile briefly breached Polish airspace during a major attack on Ukraine, prompting Warsaw to put its forces on heightened readiness. Ukrainian officials have said large-scale Russian missile and drone attacks had targeted energy infrastructure.

Tusk has been using his platform to try to add a sense of urgency to Europe’s debates about defence and aid to Ukraine, amid fears about the future of American assistance and concerns about defence industrial capacity.

“True solidarity with Ukraine? Less words, more ammunition,” he wrote on social media earlier this month.

In another post, he addressed Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives. “How many more arguments do you need to take a decision?” he wrote.

The Polish prime minister said that regardless of the outcome of the US election this year, Europe would become a more attractive partner for Washington if it became more self-sufficient militarily.

He called for urgent assistance for Kyiv, saying the next two years of the war would decide everything and that “we are living in the most critical moment since the end of the second world war”.

What was most worrying was that “literally any scenario is possible,” Tusk said. “I know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger generation, but we have to mentally get used to the arrival of a new era. The prewar era,” he said.

He added that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had blamed Kyiv for the attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall without any evidence and “evidently feels the need to justify increasingly violent attacks on civil targets in Ukraine”.

Tusk, who was prime minister between 2007 and 2014 and returned to office in December, is a veteran politician who has previously served as president of the European Council and leader of the centre-right European People’s party. He has sought to improve Warsaw’s standing in the EU and the transatlantic alliance.

In a recent social media post, he wrote: “The postwar epoch is gone. We are living in new times: in a prewar epoch. This is why Nato and solidarity between Europe and America are more important than ever before.”

In his comments this week, Tusk underscored the importance of cooperation between Poland, Germany and France, a format known as the Weimar Triangle. While there have been tensions in the past months between Warsaw and Kyiv over Ukrainian food imports, he has worked to try to smooth over differences.

“Even the closest of friends have conflicting interests and viewpoints at times,” the Polish leader said in a press conference this week alongside his Ukrainian counterpart. The discussions ended “with an even deeper conviction that no force in the world, neither in Ukraine nor Poland, could undermine their friendship”, he said.

Cover photo: Donald Tusk: ‘I don’t want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past.’ Photograph: Wojtek Radwański/AFP/Getty Images