Portugal supports the proposal to create a high-level European Union training mission for the Ukrainian army, which will be discussed this Tuesday in Prague at an informal meeting of the 27 defense ministers, Minister Helena Carreiras said.
On behalf of Portugal, I am here to once again express our support for Ukraine, as we have done, and also to express our willingness to contribute to the unity of the EU and its allies in general in this joint effort. . And, in this sense, we will support an initiative to extend this effort to the training offer, to the proposal of a new training mission for the Ukrainian forces”, said the minister, upon his arrival at the meeting.
The war in Ukraine dominates the “rentrée” of the EU Defense and Foreign Affairs ministers
The idea of launching an EU training mission for Ukrainian forces was unveiled last week by the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, who will present the proposal to the 27 member states at a meeting on Tuesday in which Ukrainians will participate. the defense minister also participates, and it comes later, last June, Portugal already made itself available to train Ukrainian soldiers.
Our idea and our proposal to support the Ukrainian forces with training ends up being matched in this proposal also by the Commission and the Council, and therefore I think the question will be how we can do this job. But it certainly corresponds to what it was and it is our intention to continue supporting Ukraine”, commented Helena Carreiras.
Upon arrival at Tuesday’s meeting, which he chairs, Borrell made the debate on “the idea of a high-level training mission for the Ukrainian army” a priority for Tuesday’s meeting, and said he hopes it will be achieved. as soon as possible. possible in Prague the “political green light” for this initiative.
This Tuesday is an informal meeting and therefore no decision can be made, but I think we can reach a general political agreement this Tuesday. Details will be defined later. We have a complex procedure to identify objectives, dimension, resources… But I hope we get the political green light for this mission”, declared the High Representative.
Last week, giving an account of the idea of creating a training mission, during a conference in Spain, Josep Borrell considered it “reasonable”, given the scale and seriousness of a conflict that threatens to drag on, and given that the EU currently have 17 military training and assistance missions around the world, pointing to the outstanding example in Mozambique.
Noting that this Tuesday there will also be a debate on “the impact of the war in what are the fields of security and defense from the point of view of the missions and operations that the EU has but also of the different regions”, the El Portugal’s Defense Minister stressed the importance of the EU’s presence in Africa.
We have this 360-degree perspective and we think that being in Africa is important. It is important because many of the threats that we face are also faced there, namely terrorism, but also the presence of non-state groups and other types of actors that are a problem, not only for that neighborhood in the south, it is say, in the Sahel and beyond, but also obviously for us, as States that feel this imminent threat”, he said.
The Ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs of the European Union will debate this Tuesday the latest developments in the war in Ukraine, in informal meetings in Prague that mark the “rentrée” community policy, after the summer holidays.
The capital of the Czech Republic – a country that assumes the six-monthly rotating presidency of the Council of the Union until the end of the year – hosts this Tuesday morning an informal meeting of defense ministers, with the participation of the minister Helena Carrerasand, between the afternoon of this Tuesday and until Wednesday, an informal meeting of the heads of the diplomacy of the 27th, with the participation of Joao Gomes Cravinho.
These informal EU ministerial meetings take place a few days after six months have passed since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, which has already flight of almost 13 million people —more than six million internally displaced persons and almost seven million to neighboring countries— according to the latest data from the UN, which classifies this refugee crisis as the worst of europe since the second world war (1939-1945).
Source: Observadora
