THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
Ukraine crisis
Eurobarometer
Macron’s travel diplomacy
Optimism about the future of the EU
(ed/hb, Paris) With the aim of de- escalating and mediating the Ukraine crisis, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is currently at the head of the EU Presidency, accomplished a diplomatic marathon. After having met the Russian President Vladimir Putin on 7th February in Moscow, he travelled to Kyiv the next day to
The risk of war in Europe
photo: ©2014 petrmalinak/Shutterstock
discuss with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before meeting the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz together with the Polish President Andrzej Duda in the Weimar Triangle format in Berlin. During their talks, Macron and Putin agreed that risk of war must be reduced by common efforts to enable a new stability and security order. Putin underpinned Russia’s conditions to collaborate: no extension of NATO towards Russian borders, no stationing of aggressive weapons in former Soviet Union territories and turn back to the geopolitical situation in 1997. Putin refuses for the moment a meeting of leaders in the Minsk format (France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine). In Kyiv, Macron assured Ukraine of the solidarity of the west, and in Berlin, Macron and Scholz, just arriving from his visit to US President Joe Biden in Washington, shared their views on the conflict with President Duda. They stated that their overall goal was avoiding war in Europe by engaging all diplomatic means and showing solidarity with all border states to Russia. But the three leaders also made clear that they would not accept peace at any price. Scholz alerted Russia that in case of an invasion of Ukraine, the consequences would be “political, economic and certainly also geostrategic”.
(last update: 09.02.2022)
Press conference Macron and Putin https://youtu.be/QHDAYz7g4u4
Citizenship
European Year of Youth (ed/Nils Cazaubon, Saint Germainen-Laye) 2022 was designated by the European Union as the Year of Youth. The idea is to rise awareness about young people’s needs and bring their voices back to the Union’s policies and actions. The youth suffered a lot from the two years of the pandemic, since The Year of Youth wants to give hope to young the restrictive Covid-19 policies ofpeople in Europe photo: © 2019 encierro/Shutterstock ten ignored the needs and perspectives of young people, negatively influencing their education and the access to jobs, leading to social isolation and increasing mental health problems. Many lost hope. With the Year of Youth, the European Union aims to react to this situation to change young people’s perspectives on their future by creating quality employment, education and training opportunities. The EU also wants to further open political spaces to young people with the goal of systematically including youth in decision-making processes at the regional, national and EU levels, but also at the United Nations level. The EU promotes the participation of youth in UN events and conferences through the organisation of side events. EU Member States are, for example, strong supporters of the UN Youth Delegate Programme (https://bit.ly/3rH2CqO) where young people can participate in intergovernmental meetings at the UN. Web European Youth Portal https://europa.eu/youth/home_en
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(ed/nc, Paris) The new Eurobarometer survey commissioned by the European Parliament (EP) and having been conducted between 1st November and 2nd December 2021 in all 27 EU Member States, revealed that EU citizens’ support for the European Union and the EP in particular has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. As regards the European values to defend, nearly one third of respondents (32%) chose democracy as the first, followed by freedom of speech and thought (27%), and the protection of human rights in the EU and worldwide (25%). The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, welcomed the results of the survey and said: “As the citizens rightly point out, defending democracy is Roberta Metsola the most imporphoto; © European Union 2022, source : EP (Denis Lomme) tant European value above anything else. We cannot take democracy for granted; extremism, authoritarianism and nationalism are today rising threats for our common European project.” 42% of European citizens see public health as a continued top policy priority, followed closely by the fight against poverty and social exclusion (40%) and action against climate change (39%), whereas young people put the fight against climate change as their top priority. A majority of EU citizens (62%) see their country’s EU membership as a good thing and a majority of respondents (63%) say they are optimistic about the future of the EU. Eurobarometer surveys are the official polling instrument used by the EU institutions and agencies to regularly monitor the state of public opinion in Europe on issues related to the European Union. Video: https://bit.ly/34Ei8ul
