After months of sabre-rattling from Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, Russian officials have been on a diplomatic tour of Europe this week, meeting the US in Geneva and Nato in Brussels. Amid this diplomatic whirl, Europe’s biggest diplomatic club has been absent. The EU has no formal role in the talks, although its officials are drawing up possible sanctions to levy against Russia if the Kremlin decides to invade Ukraine.
The EU’s exclusion from talks on war and peace in its own backyard hurts. “Between Putin and Biden, Europe is sidelined,” ran a Le Monde headline last week. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell,struck an insouciant note. “I don’t care,” he said when the BBC asked whether the US should have gone ahead with the Geneva talks. The Russians, he said, had “deliberately excluded the EU from any participation” but he had been assured by the US that “nothing will be agreed without our strong co-operation, coordination and participation”.
Not everyone buys this reassuring story about Europe’s absence from the top table. “It gives me huge concern,” Radosław Sikorski, a Polish former foreign minister, who now sits in the European parliament, told the Guardian. “The EU is a neighbour of both Ukraine and Russia, these are countries with whom we have intense relationships. And what happens between them affects several member states. Of course we should be there and I am astonished that we are not.”
The EU’s foreign policy chief, then Catherine Ashton, was at the table with the US, Russia and Ukraine in 2014 in Geneva, following the invasion of Crimea. France and Germany later switched to the narrower Normandy format, talking to Kyiv and Moscow, in an attempt to end the conflict in Ukraine. “It was the actions of some member states, Germany and France, and a diplomatic mistake by Ukraine to accept the Normandy formula, and then the Minsk formula, that has got us nowhere,” argues Sikorski. “Through a series of missteps we have ended up with the EU excluded from an issue of vital importance for us.”
In an uncomfortable irony the crisis is unfolding as EU defence and foreign ministers gather this week in Brest to discuss how the EU can be a more powerful player in a global order challenged by authoritarian powers and rogue actors. The search for the EU’s “strategic autonomy” is championed by France, which took charge of the EU rotating presidency this month. Europe, a senior French government official said, must be “fully sovereign, free in its choices and master of its own destiny”.
Another Russian invasion of Ukraine is an obvious big test for “sovereign” Europe. More than 100,000 Russian troops are stationed around Ukraine’s borders and US intelligence has reported that 175,000 could be deployed by the end of January.
EU leaders have warned of “massive consequences” in response to any further military aggression against Ukraine. The precise consequences are a closely-guarded secret, as officials believe telegraphing the details would advantage Putin by allowing him to calibrate his response. Even senior diplomats say they are in the dark about exactly what the European Commission has prepared. Nonetheless, a broad list of options has emerged, covering finance, technology and individuals.
Read more at: ‘Europe is sidelined’: Russia meets US in Geneva and Nato in Brussels | European Union | The Guardian
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