The EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrel has called for the bloc to be turned into a major military force.
“What we've learned from the Ukraine conflict is that trade, the rule of law and a strong civil society are not enough. The EU should also be a serious military force”, Borrell told reporters on Tuesday.
In this regard, he called on the EU countries to follow the NATO members’ example and increase their defence spending.
“Defence is a national competence. We must do more. We must increase our military budgets in a coordinated manner. And, of course, it will not be easy,” the EU’s foreign policy chief pointed out.
The remarks come Borrell said earlier in May that the EU run out of military hardware helping Ukraine and urged member states to bolster their defence capabilities.
This followed he making it clear that the EU is seeking to avoid a direct confrontation with Moscow, even though the bloc wants to “weaken the Russian war machine”.
“We are saying that we’re not taking part in the [Ukraine] conflict, but we’re taking sides. We want to weaken the Russian war machine. We want to weaken the ability of [Vladimir] Putin and his regime to baselessly attack a sovereign country. We want to help Ukraine defend itself. But we don’t want to go to war with Russia”, he told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.
Borrell stressed that the EU must “do more” in order to weaken the “Russian war machine”, including by supplying Ukraine with more weapons, weakening the Russian economy, and “isolating” Moscow internationally.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin underscored that the policy of trying to "contain and weaken" Russia was a long-term strategy pursued by the West. Speaking to UN Chief Antonio Guterres on 26 April, the Russian president stressed that Moscow has not given up hope on reaching a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine crisis, notwithstanding efforts by Kiev to sabotage the negotiation.
On 24 February, Putin announced the beginning of a special military operation to demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine following a request for help from the Donbass republics amid increasing attacks by the Ukrainian Army.