While Sergei Lavrov, the head of Russian diplomacy and his American counterpart Antony Blinken are meeting on Friday January 21 in Geneva to try to defuse the Ukrainian crisis, Europe seems silent. “Europe’s problem is that it did not anticipate the discussion”, estimated on franceinfo Nicolas Gros-Verheyde, editor-in-chief of Brussels2 (B2), the daily on European geopolitics and correspondent for Sud-Ouest in Brussels.
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franceinfo: We have the impression that the great absentee from this diplomatic sequence is Europe?
Nicolas Gros-Verheyde: I’m not going to tell you otherwise, you see it in the photo. It is the United States that negotiates with Russia. The European Union is not a whole, it is 27 Member States which each have their own strategy, history and policy. For some, Russia is an enemy, for others it is a partner, even a friend. So even before having a discussion with the Russians, we have to agree on what we are going to discuss and the problem of Europe, it is absent, because it did not anticipate the discussion.
How does Russia view the EU?
In 2009, Russia proposed a security agreement to Europe, which did not want or could not take the perch that was stretched out. In 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy was in Moscow to negotiate a ceasefire agreement during the Russian intervention in Georgia. Today there is none of that. In about ten years, there has been a complete change in the Russian position: it was to consider the EU as a partner to divide NATO from the United States and now it relies more on the United States and actually wants to divide the EU. Perhaps the Europeans did not know how to grasp this change.
Today Russia prefers to discuss directly with the Americans?
It’s easier. Russia’s ambition is to regain the splendor it had lost on the side of the USSR and to have a kind of glacier around it, which provides it with a certain security and an economic basin.
“With the United States, you play with the top of the class, so you are inherently tall.”
Nicolas Gros-Verheyde, journalist specializing in European issuesat franceinfo
We must therefore discuss with the USA and perhaps we will manage to have a kind of compromise, under the table, which is that Ukraine does not join the Western camp. This has always been the strategic issue.