French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday urged Europeans to be “more united and stronger than ever” and to reject “happy vassalization” towards the United States as talks on Ukraine intensify on both sides of the Atlantic, AFP reports, writes UNN.
Details
Macron took the opportunity during his visit to Portugal to deliver his message to Europeans, urging them to “rediscover a taste for risk, ambition and power” in the face of Donald Trump's unpredictability of the United States on both the Ukraine issue and customs duties.
“I see a lot of people in our Europe saying, 'We will have to be nice to the Americans, this will pass, we will have to bow down,'” he said late in the day during a meeting at a startup incubator focused on innovation and artificial intelligence.
But “the answer is not in submission” and “I'm not for happy vassalization,” he added.
On the contrary, “Europeans can be convinced of one thing: they need to be united and stronger than ever” and for that “we must necessarily make very profound choices (...) in technological, industrial (and) defense matters,” he said a little earlier, speaking in the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic.
On the visit to Washington and Ukraine
However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to Washington on Friday to finalize an agreement to develop Ukrainian minerals “is a very good thing,” said the French head of state, who himself traveled to the White House on Monday.
“I tried to explain the importance” of Ukraine and its ‘existential struggle’ for the ‘sovereignty’ and ‘security of Europeans’, he recalled. “A way to showcase himself as an Old World leader between Wednesday night's meeting with new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and a summit in London on Sunday at the invitation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who in turn was received by Trump on Thursday”, the publication points out.
Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro also praised his guest “for his outstanding work in the international arena to take positive measures for peace in Ukraine,” as well as “in other geographical regions to stabilize conflicts.
