BURSTEuropean foreign policy chief says ‘there is not going to be progress’ on sanctions package today
In turn, France’s Jean-Noël Barrot insisted it was a matter of when, not if, the 20th package of sanctions against Russia will be adopted, which he said would further deprive Russia’s Putin of capacity to pursue his “colonial fantasies” in Ukraine.
Lithuania’s foreign minister Kęstutis Budrys said he was “very frustrated” with the Hungarian block.
“I really expect that we can have the open and honest discussion, looking each other to the eyes and answering these questions: what we are doing here, what we are disrupting; is it only about Ukraine, or is it about us remaining 27 in the European Union?”
“We cannot proceed like this. We cannot give away those carrots each time and expect that, oh, there will be one country that will block so what we will [give] to them. It cannot work like this. European Union was designed in different way. …
We have one constant [source of] disruption, [and] I have the question whether we should review the decision making process. That’s one option. The other option is to also to invoke the article seven and just stop this exploitation of the principle of unanimity. It is really damaging and dangerous.”
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