The 27 European foreign ministers are meeting in Brest this Thursday January 13 and Friday the 14, where they will meet their counterparts from Defense. These are the first informal councils under the French presidency of the Council of the European Union and they take place in a climate of strong tensions with Moscow. Even if the situation in Mali, relations with China, or even Iran and its nuclear program are on the agenda, they will be largely dominated by the issue of European defense with the strategic compass project.
Defense ministers, meeting this Thursday morning in Brest, are joined at midday by EU foreign ministers. This meeting was organized in Brittany, a region from which the French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves le Drian comes from, and is chaired by Josep Borrell.
The strategic compass
Faced with the tensions that do not drop a notch between Moscow and the West, the question of European unity on defense is more burning than ever. The ministers will in particular work on the “Strategic Compass”, the first white paper on European defense, prepared by the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell, and a draft of which has been circulating for a few days in the capitals of the EU.
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The adoption of this strategic compass at the European Council in March is a priority for France and for the Commission. Concretely, the text should, for example, make it possible to rapidly mobilize and deploy 5,000 troops in the event of a crisis, but also to identify and prioritize threats or even strengthen the means of cooperation in the armaments industry.
The Ukrainian case
The 27 do not all have the same conception of the balance to be struck between this common policy and the place of NATO and the United States in European security. But they face the same challenge: how to keep some leeway in the Ukrainian crisis while Russia is working to push Brussels away to speak only to Washington.
But coordination with the Americans is perfect, declared the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell this Thursday morning in Brest, ” we have been assured that nothing will be decided or negotiated without the Europeans “. Josep Borrell also denounced the “pressure” exerted by Moscow. It is not ” no question of negotiating under pressure “, He added, before the opening of the informal Defense Council. The West accuse Moscow of having massed in recent weeks some 100,000 soldiers, tanks and artillery on the border with Ukraine to prepare an attack against this country, an intention denied by the Russian authorities.
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