After direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv failed to yield progress, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin "has gone all in" on the invasion of Ukraine.
"They want to cause as much damage as possible," Kallas told Bloomberg Television in Paris. "So, it's up to everybody to make sure that Putin doesn't win this war."
A Baltic nation that's a member of both NATO and the European Union, Estonia has been among the harshest critics of the Russian invasion.
Kallas told Bloomberg that the EU is unlikely to follow the United States' lead in blocking Russian energy imports.
"What we have to understand is that different European countries have different energy dependence," Kallas said before a two-day EU conference at Versailles, France. "One side is, 'of course we want to hurt the war machine of Putin and deprive him of his income,' but the other side is that our public has to support the decisions made as well."
The crisis in Ukraine is expected to dominate much of the discussions at the EU leaders' meeting, the Associated Press reported.
Three main topics now dictate the agenda: Ukraine's application for accelerated EU membership; how to reduce the bloc's dependency on Russian energy imports; and strengthening the region's defense capabilities.
Since the war began last month, the AP reports, the EU has displayed significant unity, as it rapidly adopted damaging sanctions that targeted Putin, Russia's financial system and its oligarchs. In a first, it also rallied to provide weapons to a country under attack.
According to the AP, the EU agreed to spend $500 million on weapons for Ukraine. Germany committed to raising defense spending above 2% of gross domestic product and agreed to send anti-tank and air defense missiles to Ukraine, breaking a long tradition of refusing to export weapons to conflict zones.
"In stepping up European defense, we must find a consensus within the EU, that sometimes the best way of achieving peace is the willingness to use military strength," Kallas told the AP.
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