In the town of Versailles, some 17 kilometers to the southwest of this capital, the rulers of the 27 member nations and leaders of the Union will address an agenda very different from the one conceived in principle by the French presidency of the Council of the EU: the model post-Covid-19 economic growth.
According to Paris, the participants will discuss the Ukrainian situation and “the new European reality in terms of security” for two days, a meeting that will be installed in the afternoon by the host president, Emmanuel Macron, and the head of the European Council, Charles Michel.
On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine, after accusing it of attacking the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, whose independence Moscow recognized, and denouncing the West’s interest in further expanding NATO’s presence to the east of the continent. , with Kiev as the spearhead.
From this context, the EU accelerated the debate on the entry of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia into its ranks, without the experts at the moment seeing the materialization of this step as possible.
According to the newspaper Le Figaro, Poland, Bulgaria and six other states are leading the efforts to insert Kiev into the bloc, without others such as Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and France seeing it favorably, and the option of creating the new privileged partner status.
Other sources mention the interest in sending a signal to Russia that its neighbor “belongs to the European family”, without implying immediate accession, in a forum in which new sanctions against Moscow would not be on the table, although the complicated issue of freeing the EU from dependence on Russian gas.
In powers like Germany and France it is admitted that changing the energy model and eliminating or reducing imports from the Eurasian giant are not a matter of weeks or months.
Renewable energy sources, the diversification of raw material suppliers and the internal manufacturing of semiconductors are some of the French proposals for a sovereignty that is known to be challenging, to say the least.
Also in the focus of the 27 member states and their leaders will be defense issues, under the same discourse of independence, reinforced with the proposal to promote common projects in the area of armaments.
The reception of the Ukrainian refugees, the humanitarian corridors and the search for a ceasefire in the conflict will be other points on the program.
jf/wmr
