You can count on the fingers of one hand the European leaders who enjoy . Whether on the street or in the offices of political power, the head of European diplomacy is unanimously considered one of the greatest allies the country has had against the Russian invasion. A few weeks after retiring, on his last official trip to kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky received Borrell this Monday in kyiv with great words of appreciation: “For having always been 100% on the side of Ukraine, on the side of the Ukrainian people ”.
Zelensky has indicated in a statement that the issues he addressed in Borrell’s fifth visit to Ukraine have been, among others, how to increase cooperation with the EU and how to complete between his Government and the G-7 countries from of Russian assets frozen abroad. The two main issues for Borrell, as he explained to EL PAÍS before the meeting with the president, were the situation on the war front, where the Russians are advancing at the highest rate since the start of the invasion in 2022, and the future presidency of Donald Trump in the United States. Zelensky to make a 180-degree turn from his electoral promises to cut off the arms tap for Ukraine and close an end to the war as soon as possible, even if it is at the cost of ceding Ukrainian territories to the invader.
Borrell’s position, like that of the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is that the European Union must assume its role as guarantor of the continent’s security as soon as possible: “Europe is in danger and Europeans must assume their responsibilities. We cannot be depending on the mood of American voters every four years.” , has finished: “The paradigm was, in defense, the less, the better. And one always prefers to raise pensions, but all human groups need to defend themselves.”
Borrell, in conversation with this newspaper, reflected on some of his decisions that have made him worthy of gratitude. “I am satisfied to have managed to break the taboo that the EU could not finance military aid to a country at war. It couldn’t be done because it hadn’t been done, until we did it. And it was done because I proposed it in a quite energetic way. And when someone from my team proposed the first figure to me, I said they should put two zeros behind it,” explains the veteran Catalan politician.
This is the question that Borrell feels most satisfied with in his work during the almost three years since the invasion began, in raising awareness so that Europe assumes that it should not only be a “soft power”, an economic and diplomatic power, It also has to be a military union to defend its States and its future members, such as Ukraine. “In recent years I have sometimes had the feeling of preaching in the desert,” says Borrell, “it took the war in Ukraine, for us to see the bear’s paws, for people to start thinking that we should have more defense capacity.”
The head of European diplomacy has stressed that it is a matter of “pedagogy” to explain to citizens that increasing public spending on defense is in the general interest: “To my Estonian friends whose families were deported twice, you do not have to explain the existential danger. which is Russia. From Cádiz, or from Lisbon, the vision is different. “Geography and history matter a lot.” What Borrell is less satisfied with is the military decisions that have been taken late, for fear of an escalation of war with Russia, since the delivery of tanks, that of the F-16 fighter planes with Western weapons: “Every time “As a qualitative leap has had to be made in military aid, we have carefully assessed, to put it diplomatically, how Russia was going to react.”
One of the weapons projects in which Borrell took charge, at the beginning of 2023, was the commitment. Even today the number has not been completed, admits the veteran socialist politician: “When the war in Ukraine comes we realize that our capacity, not for defense, but for the industrial capacity of producing the basic elements of defense such as artillery ammunition, is below minimums. And when we promise Ukraine that we will deliver one million projectiles in a few months, at that moment, the symbolic figure is thrown out without knowing very well how to satisfy such short deadlines. We are about to achieve it, and production capacity has been increased by 40% [de munición]”.
Raphael Glucksmann, a prominent French socialist MEP, criticized last week on France Inter radio that it was incredible that such a country. Borrell defends himself: “If someone is surprised that North Korea is capable of producing more weapons than Europe, it is because they do not know what this country is. North Korea is a militarized State, a country in a state of permanent war, they live for that, under a fierce dictatorship, even if they go hungry. That, luckily, is not the existential reality of Europeans.”
Integration in the EU
The integration of Ukraine into the EU is another of the issues that Borrell has discussed in his last three-day official trip to the country, in his meetings with Zelensky, with the Prime Minister, Denis Smihal, with Sibiga and with the Minister of Defense, Rustem Umerov. The Ukrainian Government wants to accelerate the incorporation of kyiv into the community club in a period of less than three years, something that Von der Leyen herself has ruled out – although indirectly -, it should serve to prepare the Ukrainian path towards the EU. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski drew Zelensky’s ire in a meeting in September in which he reminded the Ukrainian head of state that joining the Union is not easy, and that it took Poland 10 years.
Borrell believes that the Ukrainian reality is that the circumstances of Poland’s or Spain’s accession to the EU – which also required a decade – are not the same: “If you tell the Ukrainian side that it will take 10 years, that is a rupture.” of expectations. This process must have a progressive implementation, it cannot be giving everything at the end, which is how the accession processes have been until now. It has to be a gradual integration, as they carry out reform efforts. The case of Ukraine is not that of any country, and Europe is risking its credibility.”
