Talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin is no replacement for actual military support for Ukraine, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on November 17 after Russia launched yet another massive missile attack on Ukrainian infrastructure ahead of the winter.

The attack followed a telephone call from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Putin, in which Scholz warned against further escalation—a warning the Russian leader dismissed. This upset Tusk, a staunch advocate of taking a far tougher stance against Russia than Scholz.

The German chancellor has faced sharp criticism in Warsaw for what is perceived as a hesitant and overly cautious approach to confronting Moscow, and relations between Poland and German have remained touchy this year, despite Berlin's enthusiastic response to Tusk's election victory over the populist Law and Justice party.

“No one will stop Putin with phone calls. The attack last night, one of the biggest in this war, has proved that telephone diplomacy cannot replace real support from the whole West for Ukraine,” Tusk said in a post on X.

“The next weeks will be decisive, not only for the war itself but also for our future,” Tusk also said, apparently referring to the looming takeover of the US administration by Donald Trump, who, Poland fears, might want to strike a deal with Putin by cutting short military help to Ukraine, thus forcing Kyiv to concede territory in return for unspecified security guarantees. 

The Polish PM has also stepped up diplomatic efforts to rally the West around the Ukrainian cause in the context of the looming Trump presidency. Tusk has met, or will soon meet, the leaders of Nato, France, the UK, and Baltic and Nordic states.

There is a notable omission of Germany in Tusk’s plans. This comes after Berlin did not invite the Polish PM to a meeting of the US, the UK, France, and Germany in Berlin in October. “There is a government crisis [in Germany] at the moment. I realize that Germany has something else on their minds,” Tusk said about going over Scholz's head.

Tusk’s swipe at “telephone diplomacy” came shortly before the outgoing President Joe Biden gave Ukraine the green light to use the US-made ATACMS missiles to strike targets inside Russia. 

The go-ahead appears limited just to the Kursk region, which Ukraine controls but where it has faced fierce counterattacks by Russia using North Korean troops.

“While the officials said they do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war, one of the goals of the policy change, they said, is to send a message to the North Koreans that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them,” the New York Times reported.

Biden could also agree for Ukraine to use ATACMS outside of the Kursk region, the New York Times also reported.