EU-DIGEST

After meeting in Brussels on Friday, the European Council (EC) announced that EU leaders agreed to extend economic sanctions against Russia for six months.

The decision will be formally confirmed in the coming days, an EU official said.

The sanctions are aimed at Russia's financial, energy and defense industries. They are specifically intended to block Russian banks' access to EU markets and limit Russian access to some EU imports.

US sanctions against Russia are likely to figure large when US President Donald Trump meets his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 16.

Evidence of Russian meddling in the US 2016 election led the US to impose sanctions on Russia in April, but Trump and some European leaders have questioned if sanctions against Russia have the desired effect.

A spokeswoman from the German economy ministry said on Friday that the ministry had received a commitment from the US that any new US sanctions would not affect Russian pipelines, a reference to the controversial Nordstream II pipeline linking Russia and Germany.
 
Read more: EU leaders extend Russian sanctions over Ukraine for six more months | News | DW | 29.06.2018

Britain should prepare for a fundamental rift with America over military matters after the election of Donald Trump and may need to instead forge closer defence ties with Europe, the deputy head of a respected think tank has said.

The Government may have to rethink decades of defence policy with the US now Mr Trump is president and the UK should no longer count on military support from across the Atlantic.

Prof Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said Mr Trump’s “evident sympathy” for Vladimir Putin and his scepticism for America’s military alliances “cannot be assumed to be passing fancies”.

Downing Street has been warned it should prepare for a dramatic change in US policy towards Syria’s Bashar al-Assad under Donald Trump, parliamentary researchers have briefed MPs.

Washington has led calls from coalition partners for Mr Assad to step down since the early days of the five-year civil war.

However the president-elect  this week warned he was likely to rip up President Barack Obama’s policy book on Syria.

He suggested that he would drop support for the opposition and concentrate on rooting out Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which will only help bolster Mr Assad.

“I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria. My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting Isis, and you have to get rid of Isis,” he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

The proposed shift would mark a major departure from the Obama administration, which has spent millions of dollars on CIA and Pentagon programmes training rebel fighters.

“It seems reasonable to expect radical change in US foreign relations,” warned analysts from the House of Commons library in a briefing paper to MPs on the president-elect’s foreign policy.

“(Mr Trump’s) declarations against regime change might mean the US aligning more closely with Russia on the survival of the present Syrian government,” the paper said. 

 Read moreL Downing Street warned to prepare for Donald Trump reversal on Syria and military support for the UK

France will mull invoking NATO's collective defense clause, French security expert Bruno Tertrais tells DW. He also said that Paris-style attacks could happen in every major Western city.

Bruno Tertrais: It does not really come as a surprise. All the intelligence services and police knew that a major attack of the kind we had yesterday was not only possible, but almost likely. It is the kind of attack that police has tried to prevent for several years now, but it was absolutely not a surprise. Of course, it was a huge shock, especially because of the simultaneous nature of the attacks and the fact that for the first time ever, we had suicide bombers operating on the national territory.

Read more: ‘France to mull invoking NATO collective defense’ | World | DW.COM | 14.11.2015

The return of war to the European continent has come as a profound, if delayed, shock to the west. No one, just a year ago, could have imagined that it would come to this. A Europe struggling with its financial and economic woes is caught off guard by Ukraine’s turmoil and Russia’s role in that. Now, we have the immediate flashpoint in eastern Ukraine, which the Minsk declaration announced by the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia, aims to address. And then there is the long view, the wider picture to be grasped: and that concerns Europe’s future and its long-term security.

For what we are witnessing is a truly a defining moment for how the continent may look like in the 21st century, in a context where the transatlantic bond is significantly weakened. The key question revolves around how Europe will deal in the future with ensuring a stable security architecture on its territory, capable of preventing more bloodshed and thus ensuring it can defend its interests in a changing world. There are far more, and far deeper, unknowns here than in how the ceasefire will hold out in eastern Ukraine.

Note EU-Digest: Yes indeed,  Europe needs to look at its own defense. Even though it might sound completely ridiculous, an obligatory EU - wide military conscription program which mixes up conscripts from EU countries and stations them around the EU would not only solve the problem of putting together an integrated EU defense force, but also by the sheer fact of mixing the conscripts from different EU member states together in a united  military force create a strong base for unity in the EU on a long term basis.   

Read more: We Europeans must face up to our own security challenges | Natalie Nougayrede | Comment is free | The Guardian