Russia says EU has "lost its mind" over Ukraine aid
Russia's foreign ministry said the European Union had "lost its mind" and was heading down a path to ruin by allocating additional funds in military aid to Ukraine.
Germany is set to approve close to $450 million in additional military aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia, according to a finance ministry letter.
The funds are in addition to around 8 billion euros budgeted for Ukraine in 2024.
Russia has knocked out about 9 gigawatts of Ukraine's energy infrastructure, which von der Leyen said was the "power equivalent of the three Baltic states."
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova repeated an assertion that the EU has lost its autonomy and is subservient to Washington's goals, saying that Brussels was losing all authority in the process.
"Now the EU has lost its mind and paralyzed its will in order to continue following a confrontational, and for the EU suicidal, course," Zakharova said. "It is a course of escalating tensions with Russia."
The assets held by G7 members amount to some $300 billion, with most of that held in Europe by Belgium's securities depository Euroclear.
Meanwhile NATO concluded a major anti-drone exercise this week, with Ukraine taking part for the first time as the Western alliance seeks to learn urgently from the rapid development and widespread use of unmanned systems in the war there.
The drills at a Dutch military base, involving more than 20 countries and some 50 companies, tested cutting-edge systems to detect and counter drones and assessed how they work together.
The 11-day exercise ended with a demonstration of jamming and hacking drones in a week when their critical role in the Ukraine war was demonstrated once again.
Experts have warned NATO that it needs to catch up quickly on drone warfare.
"NATO has too few drones for a high-intensity fight against a peer adversary," a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank declared last September.
