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Borrell appeals to Europeans:
There is a “political crusade”, diagnoses Josep Borrell, in which citizens are called to play their part. “Europeans need the noise of the bombs at five in the morning 15 days ago when they fell on Kiev to wake them up from their sleep of well-being,” said the head of European diplomacy on Wednesday at the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. And what is a way to wake up? Consuming less gas. “Cut off the gas in your homes, reduce the dependency of those who attack Ukraine”, the High Representative for Security and Cooperation of the EU has claimed.
“Our environment is surrounded by a circle of fire fed, among others, by Russia, in the Caucasus, in Syria, in the Sahel”, said Borrell in a debate on the situation in Ukraine in which the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas: “Europeans need to face the challenges that we have not sought, but that the world projects on us. And Ukraine is the first. Cut off the gas in your homes. Let us commit ourselves more to a collective defense, which is an obligation of the treaties and to which we have paid far too little attention so far”.
In this tone, Borrell explained: “We all prefer butter to cannons, but the EU countries spent 50 years ago 4% of their GDP on defense, and now they spend 1.5% of their GDP. peace dividends were dedicated to the welfare state, but now we have to explain that our way of life has a price, that we have Europe like a French garden, and outside the jungle grows. And if we want the garden not to invade us We must take care of it and defend it.”
These are the tasks that Borrell sets for the Europeans, while describing the war unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “When they told me that the bombing had started, I saw that we were entering a new moment in history in which the Europeans we had to address Putin’s challenges. Putin thought that Ukraine was weak and subservient, but he found a strong country; he thought that we in Europe were too dependent on his gas; that the US was too dependent on China; that the distance between the US and the EU was too big; and that its army might quickly defeat a puppet regime. But it hasn’t. That war is going to last.”
Borrell has even resorted to the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution to explain the change in position he is asking of Europe: “The political change in trade relations is not enough. I think it was Lenin who said that the capitalists would be willing to sell up to the rope with which we will hang them, and Putin thought that our addiction to Russian gas was enough to make us retract. It is true that every year we pay the equivalent of the reserves that we block from the Russian Central Bank. We have blocked the stock, but we have not stopped the flow. The first thing is to cut the umbilical cord of our economy with the Russian economy and the flow to accumulate reserves with which to finance the war.”
The head of European diplomacy has insisted that getting rid of Russian dependency depends on proposals such as those presented by the European Commission on Tuesday, “which require technical, macroeconomic measures”, but also “that European citizens lower the heating of their houses, cut gas consumption such as water consumption when there is a drought or we put on a mask once morest the virus”.
“What we have done once morest COVID-19, we have to do in favor of Ukraine, it has to be a mobilization of spirits, of individual attitudes, in a collective commitment to face a undoubtedly historic task, which we have started too late, but better late than never. The defense of liberal values will not be done without citizens willing to pay a price for it, the price of any structural transformation such as changing the energy mix of a continent”.
How will the war evolve? “It is Putin’s war because he has started it and only he can stop it,” says Borrell: “Evolution will depend on the balance of military power on the ground, which is why it is important that we continue to support the people’s efforts with military means of Ukraine. The second element will be the result of the sanctions applied once morest Russia. The Russian economy is basically a gas station and a barracks, from the Sahel, to the Caucasus, Syria and now Ukraine. We must continue to increase the pressure. And it will also depend of the international mobilization and of what the rest of the world does. Putin has tried to quickly conquer the cities, and has not succeeded, and in the face of that he does what he knows how to do: bomb, as in Syria and Chechnya, without considering the victims civilians, opening humanitarian corridors on the condition that they lead to Russia”.
“Our moral condemnation might not be greater, it is a problem of diplomatic work, we have to continue working to achieve a ceasefire under the auspices of the UN. And, meanwhile, we have to rethink what we want to be, when are we going to activate the articles of the treaty that promise a complementary common defense to NATO, and dedicate more commitment to have capabilities that increase our security and our defense,” he said.
