MOSCOW, September 1. /TASS/. European countries have no capacity to provide any security guarantees for Ukraine, Karin Kneissl, former Austria’s foreign minister and head of the St. Petersburg State University's G.O.R.K.I. Center, told TASS in an interview.

"They have neither the personnel nor the weapons for this. Besides, they have to purchase weapons from the United States and cannot act otherwise, because the European Union’s defense industry is concentrated in France, Italy, and partly in Spain, but in general there is no world-class military industry in the EU. And the main thing that training of the Ukrainian military showed was that when Ukrainian soldiers were trained in Germany or the UK, the officers said that they were the ones who trained the Germans, and not the Germans or the British explained something to them," she said.

Kneissl added that while the Ukrainian army has combat experience, the armies of Europe do not.

"These armies have been reduced over the past 30 years, they were trained primarily for special operations, for special forces, for regime change, as was the case, for example, in Libya. But these are not the armies capable of waging a real war for many years. And this is a serious problem," the former foreign minister said.

"Talking about security guarantees, if the EU, which has been increasingly turning into a military alliance over the past three years, tries to create something like Article 5 [of the North Atlantic Treaty], — and we know that Ukraine will not join NATO, this is a fact, — and if now the European Union declares: if one of the EU states is attacked, all the others will immediately come to the rescue - I do not believe that such an analog of Article 5 will be able to emerge at the EU level at all."