Europe needs to talk to the Kremlin if it wants a “solution” to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Luxembourg’s Deputy Prime Minister has told Euronews, also signalling his own interest in engaging in back-channel talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We need to talk with them if we want a solution,” Bettel told Euronews’ flagship morning programme Europe Today.
“And if I (representing Luxembourg) am too small to do it, then President Macron or someone else (should be) able to represent Europe, because they don’t want to talk to Kaja Kallas,” he added, referring to the EU’s foreign policy chief.
Bettel, who met Putin in Moscow in 2015 while serving as Luxembourg’s Prime Minister, said he doesn’t have the “ego” to say he is the “right person” to act as an EU envoy to ongoing US-brokered peace talks.
“But if people are convinced that I could be helpful I will do it in any position,” he explained. “And I don’t need to be on the front of the scene. I can do it also in the back.”
“If I can be useful, I love to be useful,” Bettel added.
EU leaders including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Emmanuel Macron have recently signalled appetite for Europe to have a seat on the negotiating table to steer efforts to close a peace settlement for Ukraine. But it remains unclear who could negotiate on behalf of the bloc.
“Who represents Europe? I see Kaja Kallas wasn’t not, for example, in Washington when there was discussions with the President [Donald Trump]. It’s her job”, Bettel said during the interview on Thursday morning, adding that the EU needs a “directly elected” leader with “legitimacy.”
“Either the President of the Commission or the President of the Council should be someone who’s got the legitimacy also from the electors,” Bettel said, so that we have a “President of Europe who is really the strong person.”
“We are absent,” he added.
Bettel weighs in on Trump’s Board of Peace
Bettel also raised issues with Donald Trump’s style of foreign policy. “Trump is a businessman. He wants to have results, quick results”, he said. “The UN is too complicated for him.”
He added that Trump’s recent creation of a Board of Peace, which some see as an attempt to supplant the United Nations, it’s no good news for small countries. “If international law and international regulations are not respected anymore in the future, and it’s the power of the strongest and the biggest. This is not good for me and also for a lot of other countries, not good”, Bettel explained.
The presence of Russia’s Putin on the US-led board, created originally to promote peace in Palestine, is also politically problematic for Europe.
“You have Russia sitting around the table when it is a Board of Peace (…) I just want to remind that Russia is an aggressor in Ukraine. And so to give the feeling that they are peacemakers is a bit special too,” Bettel said, calling also for the inclusion of more Palestinian voices on the board.
Asked just before the start of the Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Brussels, where ministers are expected to back listing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)as a terrorist organisation, Bettel said hoped the EU would be able to send “a strong signal for the Iranian population”.
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