Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 3 April 2014 - Brussels

Main aspects and basic choices of the common foreign and security policy and the common security and defence policy (Article 36 TEU) - EU comprehensive approach and coherence of EU external action (debate)

  Indrek Tarand (Verts/ALE). - Mr President, against the background of the aggression in Crimea, a particular irony is hidden in the fact that France is continuing with the sale of two Mistral helicopter carriers to Putinist Russia. It reminds me of the 16th Century chronicle writer Balthasar Russow in Tallinn, who warned the Dutch against selling weapons to Russia: sooner or later they will be turned against the West, he wrote. There is a solution though, through our CFSP. The EU should purchase those vessels from France for its naval force. Germany and the Netherlands should provide the missing helicopters; Nordic countries, for instance, the crews. Mistrals could be sent to a war that is close to the Horn of Africa, where exactly that kind of capacity is needed to help the Somalian build-up. Besides, we will have a double game: a reduction of aggressionary pressures on Ukraine and Georgia, let alone Poland and the Baltic States. I am not kidding. I am dead serious about it.