Sydney: Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said that Europe is not “strong enough right now” and that it “would be in trouble without the US”. The Finnish leader who is currently on a visit to Australia, made the remarks at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney in early December, the BBC reported.

Stressing on the need to strengthen Europe’s defences since military stocks are depleting due to a constant supply flow to Ukraine, Marin said: “I must be brutally honest with you, Europe isn’t strong enough right now... We would be in trouble without the US.

“The US has given a lot of weapons, a lot of financial aid, a lot of humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Europe isn’t strong enough yet.” Since the beginning of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the US has committed $18.6 billion in support to Kiev and is by far the largest provider of military assistance to the war-torn nation.

The second largest donor is the European Union, followed by the UK. Marin went on to say that Europe must make sure it is “building those capabilities when it comes to European defence, European defence industry, and making sure that we could cope in different kinds of situations”, reports the BBC.

The Prime Minister also criticised some European countries’ attempts at building closer ties with Russia in recent decades. “For a long time, Europe was building a strategy for Russia... to buy energy from Russia and to close those economic ties, and we thought that this would prevent the war,” she said, adding that mindset was “proven entirely wrong”.

European countries should have listened to states like Poland and the Baltics, Main said, who had warned that Russia does not “care about their economic ties, they don’t care about the sanctions, they don’t care about any of that” when it comes to invading Ukraine.