Finland’s President Stubb says Trump ‘woke up Europe in foreign policy’, Putin - ‘in security’

Finnish President Alexander Stubb on Saturday said US President Donald Trump “woke up Europe in foreign policy”, and Russian President Vladimir Putin - “in security”.

“If you look at NATO’s defence spending, you see that Europe is preparing for the worst because of Putin. At the same time, Trump quite successfully managed to pressure Europe into raising its defense spending”, he noted.

The President also emphasised that Putin had failed to achieve his main goals, calling the outcome “perhaps the biggest strategic geopolitical defeat in modern history”.

Stubb said none of the Kremlin’s objectives had been met. Instead, “with his actions, Putin has united Europe, expanded NATO with Finland and Sweden, and effectively raised NATO’s defence spending from two to five percent of GDP”.

On territorial ambitions, Stubb recalled that Russia had spent more than a decade attempting to seize Ukraine’s Donetsk region. “He has been trying for 12 years to annex Donetsk, half of which he had already taken before the war even began”, he said.