Brussels, 16/12/2021 – 10:31
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Good morning,
Today, from the point of view of the foreign and security policy, we have two very important issues: the crisis in Ukraine and the Strategic Compass.
You know that the Strategic Compass tries to increase the resilience of the European Union and to increase its defensive capacities.
We presented it some months ago and now we expect the leaders to give us guidance in order to be able to approve it in March. The discussions with the Member States are going well and I think that everybody understands that the current circumstances, with a lot of challenges being faced by the European Union, we need to have better and stronger capacities to defend ourselves, to increase our security policy.
And this is related to the situation in Ukraine, where Russia has to deescalate the tensions and to avoid any aggressive actions against Ukraine, because we are, all European Union Member States, united in order to support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and any aggressive action will be with higher political and economic cost.
Q&A
The President said yesterday that we are prepared, that the package is ready, so what is it in that package of sanctions to Russia?
Well, I cannot tell it, we are going to discuss it before we have an agreement, but we are preparing a full set of sanctions.
And do you think it will be easy to reach a consensus among all the countries?
Yes, this time, yes.
Link to the video: https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-215971