Borrell to the Europeans: lower the heating to pay the price of the war

The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, asked European citizens on Wednesday to “turn down the heat in your houses”, because you have to “pay a price” by “cut the umbilical cord” with the Russian economy because of the war in Ukraine.

“The first thing we have to do is cut the umbilical cord that unites our economy with the Russian economy and cut off the flow that allows it to accumulate reserves with which to finance the war.Borrell said in a European Parliament debate with Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas on the Russian invasion.

For Borrell, “we can do that at the macro political level”, as the European Commission did yesterday when presenting its directive to reduce Russian gas imports by two thirds by the end of the year, but “also calls for European citizens to turn down the heating in their homes”.

“It also asks that everyone make an individual effort to cut gas consumption, just as we cut water consumption when there is a drought and just like when we put on a mask to fight the virus.”, pointed out the high representative.

The former Spanish minister assured that “what we have done against COVID-19 we must do for Ukraine. It has to be a mobilization of spirits, of activities, of individual attitudes, in a collective commitment to face a task that is undoubtedly historic”.

“Europeans need the noise of the bombs at five in the morning a fortnight ago as they fell on Kiev to wake them up from their sleep of well-being, to allow them to face the challenges that we have not sought, but that the world projects on us and on Ukraine it is the first one“, he claimed.

With the sanctions that Western countries are applying against Moscow, “Russia today is basically a gas station and a barracks. It is a place where they sell hydrocarbons and with it they feed armed forces willing to intervene where necessary: ​​from the Sahel to the Caucasus, with Syria and now in Ukraine.“, said.

Borrell added that “We have to keep increasing the pressure.” against the Kremlin and assured that “the defense of liberal values ​​will not be done if there is no political commitment from citizens willing to pay a price for themBorrell said.

The high representative also called for an increase in spending by European countries on defense, since, he said, since 1975, when the Helsinki Agreements were signed at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, they had allocated 4% of GDP to military spending and, today, an average of 1.5%.

“Nobody likes to tell their citizens that they have to increase their military effort. We all prefer butter to cannons”, he pointed.

But for Borrell, this decrease in the defense budget “in 50 years of peace, it could be justified when the peace dividends were used to increase social security, it is a Welfare State”.

“We have organized Europe like a French garden, ordered, regulated, governed by laws and regulations, but outside, the jungle grows, and if we do not want the jungle to invade our garden, we have to invest not only in taking care of it, but in defending it”, he concluded.