Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Friday during her visit to Australia that the European Union would not be able to show its support for Ukraine without US help.
"I will be brutally honest with you: Europe is not strong enough right now," she said at an event at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney.
"We would be in trouble without the United States involving (itself in) the war in Ukraine," said Marin, adding the US has played the most important role so far in supplying arms and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.
"For a long time Europe was building a strategy towards Russia to closen our economic ties, to buy energy from Russia," Marin said, adding: "We thought that this would prevent the war."
That assumption, she said, has proven to be completely wrong. Instead, Marin asserted, the EU should have listened much earlier to warnings from Estonia and Poland, for example.
Marin's trip to Australia on Friday also included a meeting with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Before that, she visited New Zealand and met Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, making her the first Finnish prime minister ever to make an official visit to the country.
