United States Ambassador to the EU Anthony Gardner said on Tuesday 8 November that, if the Ukrainian project were to fail, the EU would be failing too.
If the EU does not stand up for democracy and territorial integrity, then, he asked, what is the EU for? How, he wondered, can values be protected? Gardner was addressing the European Parliament foreign affairs committee on the day that the US went to the polls to elect its next president. With European unity under pressure every time sanctions have to be extended, he said that there must be no relaxation of the measures against Russia until the Minsk agreements are implemented. He added that a strong Ukraine was a thorn in the foot of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy, suggesting, too, that Russia was returning to the stagnation of the pre-Gorbachev era. The ambassador stressed the United States’ opposition to the Nord Stream gas pipeline project, adding that it would not diversify EU supply as the gas would still come from Russia.
Stating that the TTIP talks were progressing, Gardner hoped that an agreement would be reached under the next US administration, that is, before the end of 2020.
He made clear, too, that never had the future of the European project featured so highly among Washington’s priorities. He said that the United States needed a strong European Union, whoever the new US president might be. Were Europe to lose confidence in itself and in its values, it would lay itself open to those who want to undermine the democratic and free-trade model. He hoped that Brexit would be balanced and seamless, that the EU and the United Kingdom would retain close relations and that the UK, once it has left the EU, would remain a close partner, particularly on common foreign and security policy and NATO. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)