Section: European Voice (EU)
Russian defence officials added to EU blacklist
The European Union has added three senior Russian defence officials to the list of Russians and Ukrainians barred from entering the EU for undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The decision to impose restrictions on the Russian defence officials and 16 other individuals followed the killing of 30 civilians in the southern port city...
EU views Ukraine deal cautiously
Realism tinged with relief was the dominant mood among leaders of the European Union today as they began to absorb the details of an agreement wrung out of the Russian and Ukrainian presidents overnight by the leaders of France and Germany. The mood was set by Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, as she headed into the EU summit in Brussels...
Greek defiance masks important concessions
Greece’s hated bailout memorandum and the ‘troika’ of officials that enforced it “no longer exist”, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s new prime minister, declared tonight (13 February) following his first European Council. Yet in the margins of the meeting he authorised Greece’s experts to enter into technical discussions with...
EU to step up counter-terrorism co-operation
EU leaders meeting in Brussels today (12 February) called for increased use of existing cross-border co-operation tools to track terrorist fighters returning from fighting in Syria. But they stopped short of calling for a immediate revision of the EU’s Schengen Border Code. Though today’s informal summit was originally supposed to...
Live blog: EU summit
European leaders are meeting in Brussels today (12 February) to try to hash out solutions to a triumvirate of problems plaguing the European Union – terrorism, the spectre of Greece leaving the eurozone and the deteriorating situation in Greece. Scroll down for live updates and video from the summit. Last night a meeting of eurozone finance...
What might scare Putin’s regime?
Something must be done. This is something. So let’s do it. That (put crudely) is the way Western foreign policy thinking works when confronted with a tough problem. Two ‘somethings’ were under discussion here at the Munich Security Conference: the Franco-German diplomatic initiative to end the war in Ukraine, and the American idea of...
EU leaders focus on Ukraine
The leaders of France and Germany will take centre stage today when European leaders turn to the conflict in eastern Ukraine at their informal summit in Brussels. As European Voice went to print, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s François Hollande were still holding crisis talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and...
How Greece could make things worse
The European Union is currently engaged in two games of bluff, each of them of enormous importance to the future development of Europe. The smaller contest is between the newly-elected government of Greece and the other countries of the eurozone, over whether or not the bail-out provided by international lenders should be prolonged, and on what...
Commission may put off big decisions on energy union
The crisis in Ukraine has highlighted Europe’s dangerous dependence on Russian gas and the lack of an interconnected energy market. Yet despite the increasing urgency of Europe’s energy predicament, it appears that the European Commission will put off major decisions when it adopts a much-awaited strategy paper on energy union on 25...
Member states oppose Commission’s plan to withdraw waste proposal
A plan to obtain member state endorsement of the Commission’s intention to withdraw the ‘circular economy’ proposal to reduce waste landfill was dealt an unexpected blow today (10 February) by Europe ministers meeting in Brussels. The Commission planned to ask ministers meeting at the general affairs council today whether they had a...
