Borrell: EU will not die for Donbass
The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, amid recent statements by French President Emmanuel Macron about studying the likelihood of sending the military to Ukraine, stated that the EU would not go to die for Donbass and urged not to scare people, RIA Novosti reports
Josep Borrell provided information about the EU's position before the start of the EU summit in Brussels.
“There is no need to scare people that war is inevitable. The need to support Ukraine is inevitable. It is not about dying for Donbass, it is about helping Ukrainians so that they are not being killed for Donbass or not being killed in Kyiv when it is being bombed,” he noted.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron claimed that the leaders of Western countries had talked about the possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine, a consensus had not yet been reached, ‘but nothing could be ruled out’. Before that, he also said that France ‘had no limits and no red lines’ on the issue of assistance to Ukraine.
After Mr. Macron's statements, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius stated that Germany would not send its military personnel to Ukraine, and Olaf Scholz drew attention to the fact that NATO countries as a whole were not going to do that. The Chancellor again announced that there were no plans to transfer long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.
Moscow officials later commented that they had drawn attention to Emmanuel Macron's words that the topic of sending military personnel to Ukraine had been discussed in Europe, and his position on inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia in Ukraine was also well known to Russia. The Kremlin is confident that a number of countries participating in the Paris event on Ukraine maintain ‘a fairly sober assessment of the potential dangers of such an action and a potential danger of direct involvement in a hot conflict’, and this is ‘absolutely not in the interests of these countries, they should be aware of this’.
The Head of the Delegation of the Russian Federation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control, Konstantin Gavrilov, believes that the possible dispatch of Western countries' militaries will increase the risk of a direct clash between NATO and Russia.
