Polish foreign minister calls for long-term rearmament of Europe to curb Putin

A long-term rearmament of Europe in which the UK can play the closest possible role is necessary to defeat Russian imperial ambitions, the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, has said.

- Patrick Wintour

He also called for majority voting for EU sanctions, a 5,000-strong EU mechanised brigade and said Poland was willing to back an EU-wide scheme to incentivise Ukrainian draft dodgers to return to their homeland.

In an interview with the Guardian, Sikorski also said Poland backed the right of Ukraine to strike at military targets inside Russia, arguing that the west had to stop constantly limiting itself in what it did to support Ukraine.

The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has been holding out on the possibility of Ukraine using American weapons on Russian territory.

Sikorski, educated at Oxford University alongside David Cameron, was in London for a bilateral meeting with the foreign secretary. He has been a critical figure in taking Poland back to the mainstream of European foreign policy since elections last October saw a new coalition government and an end to eight years of rule by the rightwing nationalist Law and Justice party. He had just come from a meeting in Berlin with the foreign ministers of France and Germany in the so-called Weimar triangle format, a grouping now seen as the political powerhouse of the EU.

Although he said Russia was winning mainly small pyrrhic victories, the Weimar group backed a broadly drawn attempt to fill massive gaps in EU defence capabilities formed at the end of the cold war.