Visiting EU president tells ToI: We’ll pressure Putin for as long as it takes
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe sees Jerusalem as a valuable ally on defense, energy, food security, says Von der Leyen; Iran deal ready but ‘political decisions needed’
In February 2015, as Russia-backed separatists waged war in eastern Ukraine, America seemed eager for a fight.
Then-vice president Joe Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin “continues to call for new peace plans as his troops roll through the Ukrainian countryside and he absolutely ignores every agreement that his country has signed in the past.”
Former US Air Force general Philip Breedlove, then NATO’s top commander, told journalists that military support for Ukraine should be part of the package of Western pressure on Russia. “There is a large tool bag that we can use,” he said.
But among Europe’s major powers, the tone was different.
At that month’s annual security conference in Munich, Germany’s then-defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, expressed Berlin’s view that military support was counterproductive. As The New York Times paraphrased her comments at the time, “Germany sees Ukraine and Russia as a chance to prove that in the 21st century, developed nations should solve disputes at the negotiating table, not with weapons.” Russia, she noted, could match any Western help with “an almost infinite supply of weapons it could send in to Ukraine.”
That was the view of the Merkel government, of Francois Hollande’s France, of much of Europe.
No longer.
“For the first time in history, the EU is financing deliveries of weapons – we have so far allocated two billion euros to cover the needs of the Ukrainian defense forces,” von der Leyen, now president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, told The Times of Israel in an interview by email ahead of her visit to Israel, which begins Monday.
The visit is about many things, some of them standard fare for such trips. Von der Leyen will be meeting Palestinian leaders in Ramallah, tour the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and so on.
But the heart of the trip is, ultimately, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the profound reorientation sparked by that aggression, including Europe’s sudden need to expand its defense capabilities, energy supply and food security.
The change in tone and outlook that has come over von der Leyen since Putin’s February invasion is, like her, representative of Europe as a whole.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/with-russian-threat-looming-european-union-chief-looks-to-israel-for-solutions/