A two-day summit of the European Union kicked off in Brussels on Thursday, with leaders of the bloc’s 27 member states coming together in the Belgian capital.
The meeting, taking place less than two weeks before the NATO alliance’s summit in Vilnius next month, is expected to tackle many of the same issues, including the ongoing security crisis in Ukraine and purported Chinese threats to Europe.
The meeting, running from June 29-30, is expected to mainly focus on issues including the Ukrainian conflict, the European bloc’s economy, security, defense, migration, cooperation with NATO and increasingly tense ties with China.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will be in attendance as officials prepare for the bloc’s Vilnius summit in July, highlighting the ties between the Western economic and military blocs.
Just like last year’s EU summit, the Thursday-Friday meeting’s top focus is Ukraine.
Kiev’s centrality to the agenda makes sense, from Brussels’ perspective, given the bloc’s decades-long push to pull the Eastern European nation into the EU, and the enormous resources which have been funneled into propping Ukraine up economically and supporting it militarily amid the West’s proxy war with Russia over the past year-and-a-half.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to join EU leaders virtually to give them an update of the situation at the front, where Kiev’s counteroffensive is showing signs of bogging down as Western officials push Ukraine to continue the hopeless assault against fortified Russian positions.
EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell stressed repeatedly in recent weeks that Brussels’ Kiev client state would quickly collapse without Western support.
Economic matters are also high on the agenda this year, with the Council expected to discuss the current economic outlook following the 20-member Euro-zone’s slip into a recession earlier this year amid soaring energy prices – caused in part by the bloc’s rejection of cheap and plentiful Russian energy.
The two-day meeting will include discussions on measures to bolster EU security and defense capacity, and the strengthening of the technological and industrial base of the European defense sector.
The summit is also expected to include discussions on China, Brussels’ other major competitor besides Russia.
China proposed a comprehensive, 12-point peace plan in February, with the plan met favorably as a jumping off for talks by Russia, but dismissed by Kiev and its Western patrons as irrational and biased.
Some officials expect the EU to focus on growing economic threats posed by China, with discussions expected to include putting curbs on dual use technologies which could enhance the military capacities of some countries of concern.
Other sources said the bloc is hoping to at least outwardly soften its China policy so as not to piss off Beijing amid growing economic tensions.
The tricky topic of immigration is another major issue which will be brought, with EU leaders set to review the migratory situation in the bloc, and take note of updates in the bloc’s migration and asylum policy, including measures taken to strengthen the EU’s external borders.
Europe has faced a three-pronged immigration crisis over the past decade, attributed to the West’s global policy, with the NATO bombardment of Libya in 2011 and the CIA dirty war against Syria prompting millions of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants to make their way into Europe from Africa and the Middle East.
The escalation of the Donbass crisis into a full-blown NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine last year exacerbated the problem, with over four million Ukrainian nationals settling in EU countries including Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy and France.
A Brussels think tank calculated in December hosting Ukrainian refugees cost 43 billion euros in 2022 alone, placing huge strains on the bloc’s social safety net.
Sputnik / ABC Flash Point News 2023.
You mean NATO, the EU doesn’t exist anymore it has become NATO.