Germany

BERLIN, April 20. /TASS/: Germany currently does not have any armaments that it can supply to Ukraine on a short notice, German Minister for Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock said at a joint press conference with her Latvian counterpart Edgars Rinkevics in Riga on Wednesday.

BERLIN, April 19 (Reuters) - Germany will continue to support Ukraine militarily and financially although it has practically maxed-out the weapons it can deliver from its own stocks and is instead working with the armaments industry, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday.

Among the weapons that military equipment makers said they could deliver quickly and that Ukraine needed were anti-tank and air defence weapons, Scholz told a news conference after participating in a call with Western allies.

April 14 (Reuters) - Frustration is growing among German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's junior coalition partners over what they say are shortcomings in his leadership on Ukraine, an internal rift that risks undermining Western unity against Russia.

After a dramatic policy pivot at the start of the crisis, when Scholz halted the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project with Russia days before its invasion of Ukraine, and then vowed a big jump in defence spending, his partners accuse him of dithering.

(AP) --- The head of the European Central Bank could drop more hints Thursday about when the bank will start raising interest rates, with pressure increasing to follow the United States, United Kingdom and other countries in taking a harder line to combat soaring consumer prices.

People in the 19 countries that use the euro currency have seen costs increase for everything from food to fuel as inflation rose to an annual rate of 7.5% last month, the highest since statistics began in 1997.

BERLIN (AP) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Wednesday criticized a diplomatic snub by Ukraine for his country’s president and defended Berlin’s record on delivering weapons to Kyiv amid tensions that have flared at a delicate moment in German policymaking on the war.

BERLIN, April 12 (Reuters) - A planned visit to Kyiv by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was not welcomed by Ukraine, he said on Tuesday, following a report that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was critical of Steinmeier's historic advocacy of Western rapprochement with Russia.

Steinmeier had planned to visit Kyiv with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda and the presidents of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia "to send a strong signal of European solidarity with Ukraine there," he told journalists during a visit to Warsaw.

BERLIN (AP) — A German Cabinet minister has apologized for taking a long vacation shortly after devastating floods last year in the state where she was then a senior official, but it isn’t clear whether the move will help relieve pressure on her.

Anne Spiegel became the minister for families and women in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Cabinet in December. Before that, she was the environment minister and deputy governor of Rhineland-Palatinate state — the region worst hit by floods in July that killed more than 180 people in Germany.

FRANKFURT, April 7 (Xinhua) -- The Russia-Ukraine conflict added to the uncertainties amid which the European Central Bank (ECB) chose to adopt a prudent stance in formulating its agenda for rate hikes, according to minutes released by the central bank on Thursday.

Commodity prices have surged and energy prices in the euro area have hit record highs since the eruption of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. "The resulting energy price rise had contributed to a substantial reappraisal by markets of the euro area inflation outlook," the ECB said.

UEDEM, Germany (AP) — As Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine accelerated early this year, military planners at NATO began preparing to dispatch scores of fighter jets and surveillance aircraft into the skies near Russia and Ukraine. It was a warning to Moscow not to make the mistake of targeting any member country.

Even in the weeks preceding the war, politicians and analysts were divided over whether President Vladimir Putin would really order Russian troops to invade. From a military point of view, though, the forces arrayed around Ukraine appeared designed to do just that.

BERLIN (AP) — The German government unveiled a major package of reforms Wednesday to boost the production of renewable power, meet its climate goals and become independent of energy imports from hostile nations such as Russia.

The 600-page “Easter package” approved by Cabinet lays out ambitious goals for the expansion of offshore power and declares the installation of renewable energy to be of “overriding public interest” — a trump card meant to cut through Germany’s often lengthy bureaucratic processes.