EU diplomacy chief Josep Borrell is one of the officials whose support for Ukraine is not widely known about by the general public. The Spanish politician from Catalonia is not particularly known for his eloquence (though he has made some memorable statements, such as “Ukrainians receive a lot of applause, but not enough ammunition!”), and he has largely acted behind the scenes.
But his contribution to Ukraine’s resilience cannot be overstated.
Borrell’s fellow diplomats say he was instrumental in the EU’s decision to fund arms supplies to Ukraine in 2022. In the years since then, he has worked tirelessly to overcome resistance from countries like Hungary.
Borrell can afford to be more candid now, as his term as the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is soon coming to an end. European Pravda seized this opportunity to speak with the EU’s top diplomat.
In one of the most open interviews of his tenure, Borrell discusses expectations of Donald Trump, why EU aid to Ukraine isn’t solely about values, the failed attempt to secure fighter jets for Ukraine in 2022, and why Russian propaganda is the main challenge in keeping aid for Ukraine going.
“The Americans have elected Trump knowing perfectly well who he is”
The world is changing. Donald Trump has won the US elections. We have heard your statements that the EU will stand with Ukraine anyway, but can you convince Ukrainians that this will definitely happen?
The world is not just changing – it has changed. And our societies are changing.
The Trump election in the US shows that there are internal and external dynamics which make people have different relationships with politics – even with truth. There are deep transformations in the world, in geopolitical balances and inside democratic societies.
The Americans have elected Trump knowing perfectly well who he is and what they can expect from him.
And we have to work with it.
For Europe, this is another awakening moment. A moment to realise that we cannot outsource our security to anyone. It’s up to us to take care of ourselves. If we want to influence the world, we need to be more united, we need to build a stronger Europe.
And I hope that we Europeans will be able to do that. At least, that’s what the leaders of the EU agreed on a couple of days ago in Budapest.
All the leaders? Including Hungary?
That we have to be stronger and more united – everybody agrees on that.
But then comes the fact that this new reality affects Ukraine, the Middle East, and China – the three poles of the geopolitical tensions today. Things will certainly be different. But we don’t know how different they are going to be, as the Trump administration is still not in office.
Some certainty is there: there will be measures related to international trade, there will be tariffs imposed on Chinese products and tariffs on EU products.
But we don’t know what the US policy will be in respect to Ukraine.
People in Ukraine are afraid that the US will stop sending weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
I cannot judge the intention of an administration which does not exist yet. I don’t know who is going to be the State Secretary or Secretary of Defense.
But I know that the European Council has just reaffirmed the commitment of the European Union to support Ukraine, and I’m here to pass on this message.
The EU-Ukraine security agreement signed in June for the next 10 years is still valid. We have been supporting Ukraine and we will continue supporting Ukraine. Not because we are very friendly and we are very generous – but because it is in our interest! The security of Ukraine is part of our security!
Let’s not hide the elephant in the room – the elephant named Viktor Orbán. He’s not shy about saying that the West should force Ukraine to go to the negotiating table, or that military supplies should stop. Is there unity on Ukraine in the EU?
Let me stress that for the last three years, Hungary has been in favour of all the decisions the EU has taken in regards to sanctions and supporting Ukraine.
[€]122 billion [US$131 billion] of overall European assistance to Ukraine. 122 billion!
This would not have been possible without unanimity, and Hungary has been part of it.
Can we be sure that the European Peace Facility (EPF) will continue to provide funds for weapons for Ukraine? (Editorial note: Hungary has been blocking the EPF for quite some time)
The EPF was the first thing we got in 2022 to provide military support.
Now we have built other tools too – like a €35 billion loan connected to the frozen Russian assets. Also, we have a special fund to develop the capacity of Ukraine’s defence industry.
To continue using the European Peace Facility, we need unanimity. I cannot assure you that unanimity will exist.
“We’ve supplied more than 980,000 artillery shells to Ukraine this year”
Over the last few days, many people in Ukraine have been praising your work since 2022. But let’s take a look back at what the EU has done overall. What could the EU have done but didn’t?
I think that we have done a lot, but certainly we could have done it quicker.
We have done a lot, but every step further on the quality of our support – be it Patriot, be it Leopard, be it fighter jets – required too long discussion. Every single time we had to overcome the concerns of some member states who were afraid of escalation.
Yes, we could have done it quicker. But we are who we are. The EU is a group of 27 member states with different views that need unanimity (in foreign policy decisions).
And you remember: we started by offering helmets, and now we are offering F-16s.
I also remember that in late February 2022, in the first few days of the full-scale war, you even said that EU member states would provide their Soviet-made fighter jets to Ukraine.
Yes, I said that if we want to support Ukraine, we should provide you with the most needed resources to win this war. And fighter jets were one of them.
I remember proposing to immediately donate to Ukraine the fleet of MiGs that some EU members (former members of the Warsaw Pact) had.
This would have been a good move – but it took time to decide to do that, and we ended up with modern F-16s. This is a typical example of things that now, retrospectively, allow me to say: we should have done it quicker.
You probably went beyond your mandate with those statements in 2022. I imagine you were criticised by EU member states for that?
Well, I have the right to make proposals. My mandate is not only to implement the policy, but to contribute to shaping it. And to shape the policy, I had to go out with ideas. That’s how I proposed to use the European Peace Facility, to arm Ukraine – despite the fact that the EPF was not written for that. But before waiting for a mandate to re-shape the EPF, I said: why don’t we do that?
So in some cases, I had to be at the forefront.
That’s why I said: why don’t we provide Ukraine with the MiGs that many of you have and you don’t use, while Ukraine needs them desperately, and they have pilots and all the infrastructure to use it immediately.
But even when my proposals have not been accepted, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to propose them.
How are things going with another EU pledge – the commitment to supply about 1 million rounds of artillery shells per year? Will it be fulfilled this year?
We’re almost there. We are at more than 980,000. So very soon, we will have provided 1 million rounds.
I know that the engagement was to reach this capacity by springtime. It did not happen in spring, but it will be by the end of the year. And for that we have accelerated a lot.
And additionally to that, there is a lot of ammunition that has been supplied to Ukraine by bilateral agreements with member states, plus the Czech initiative that is working, even if it’s not as quick as we expected.
All in all, our overall supplies to Ukraine will be more than 1.5 million by the end of the year.
And what about next year?
Once we have reached cruise speed, and since we have increased our production capacity by more than 40%, we could continue providing Ukraine with the same amount of ammunition.
The problem was not supplying, but producing.
When we promised to reach 1 million shells for the springtime, we didn’t know exactly what our production capacity was, and it was not as big as we thought.
Now we have this production capacity.
“The EU provides security. We have provided €42 billion in arms!”
Let me focus on the former “trio” – Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Georgia is definitely going backwards. Moldova has managed to keep on the European track. Could you describe your vision of the region? Are there any similarities?
First, I don’t see any similarity between Georgia and Ukraine. Not at all.
The President and the government of Ukraine is fully engaged with European Union membership, as well as Ukrainian society.
There is no doubt that your country wants to be a member of the European Union.
And Ukraine’s membership in the EU is the strongest security commitment or security guarantee that we can offer to Ukraine.
That’s not the case with Georgia, certainly.
We have been telling the Georgian rulers, the Georgian government, that they are diverging from the European track. And if they want to be a member of the European Union, they have to change the law they have approved, to fix the problems evident at elections, to go back to the track.
They need strong changes even to be considered still a candidate to the European Union.
And that is not the case with Ukraine at all!
But Ukraine can’t demonstrate how we hold free and fair elections, because elections can’t be held while hostilities are going on.
It’s up to you to decide when you want to hold elections, but I understand fully that the middle of the war is not the most appropriate moment to go into elections.
And I don’t remember anyone pushing Ukraine to do elections now. At least in the European Union I haven’t heard anyone disputing that in the middle of a war it’s not the most appropriate moment to launch elections.
You said in your previous answer that EU membership is the best security guarantee for Ukraine. But does the EU provide security?
Yes, we provide security. We have provided €42 billion in arms! What else do you call it?
I mean security guarantees acquired by member states. With NATO, the security guarantee is clear – the whole Alliance has a commitment to defend every Ally. There is no such instrument in the EU.
The EU is not a military alliance, like NATO is.
But the European Union does have some solidarity clauses: there are articles in our treaty that say that if one member is the victim of aggression, the others have to supply support.
Some people believe that it’s the equivalent of Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Others say that it is not that clear a similarity. But it’s not disputed that there is an article demanding that all member states show solidarity if someone is being attacked.
Note. The Treaty of the EU (Article 42) says: “If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power(…). Commitments and cooperation in this area shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which, for those States which are members of it, remains the foundation of their collective defence and the forum for its implementation.”
So not being a military alliance doesn’t mean that we don’t provide each other security guarantees.
We have been showing solidarity with Ukraine even without you being a member of the European Union. And there would have been much more if you were a member.
Now, as the US is keen to distance itself from Europe, do you expect the EU to become more integrated in terms of security?
I hope so. It depends on the will, but certainly it’s possible.
I’ve been spending the last years of my mandate trying to build a stronger Europe by building a more capacity for common defenсe.
We are not going to create a European army, but we are going to make our armies more cooperative and more interoperable, to avoid gaps and duplications for building a common defenсe capacity. This is part of my job, as I’m the EU High Representative also for security and defenсe.
We will go as far as we want, depending on the will of the member states.
But we are on this way.
And the election of the new US president, who has been showing some reluctance about supporting the defence of others, is a good moment, a good occasion, for Europeans to take responsibility for their own security and defence capacities.
“Ukraine is doing better than some states who have been preparing for membership for many years”
Let’s talk about reforms. I understand that no membership is possible without reforms.
The European Union is a club of member states who agree to behave in a certain manner in many domains. We share a lot of policies, and this requires a certain preparedness. Particularly because the economies have to compete.
And the desire to be a member of the European Union is not enough. The process of reforms is needed to guarantee that all criteria will be fulfilled.
It’s not because we wish it: it’s because these are our rules. To fulfil certain conditions you need reforms.
But I want to say that in the last report about the enlargement process that the Commission approved some weeks ago, Ukraine was considered to be doing very well, much better than some other states who have been preparing for membership for many more years. In the last report, Ukraine is very well rated.
So you have to do reforms, and you are doing it. You are well on track.
It shows that Ukrainian society is really willing to become a member of the European Union and ready to make the efforts necessary to make it a reality.
And I know that you support it too – allow me to thank you personally for that.
Indeed, I spent quite a lot of time and effort to open the way for Ukrainian membership of the European Union, when not everybody was convinced.
And I really admire what you do.
Let me focus on the defenсe industry – I just visited a drone factory that grew from nothing. Ukrainian innovation capacity and production capacity is astonishing! So I think that Ukrainian people deserve to keep their sovereignty and independence. And you deserve to be a member of the European Union club.
But it’s not only me who decides – in the end, it’s the 27 member states who have to make a decision.
And the thing I wish in the last days of my mandate is that we continue supporting Ukraine more and quicker. Whatever happens in the US, we have to commit to Ukraine, because it’s in our own interest.
If Ukraine falls, our security will be at stake.
And this has to be explained to the European people.
Not everybody in Europe understands why we have to spend 122 billion on Ukraine.
You know, 122 billion is a lot of money!
Not all European citizens (who also have needs and concerns) understand that.
And here comes Russian propaganda falsely claiming that “by supporting Ukraine you are prolonging the war”. Like, “if you love peace, you have to stop supporting Ukraine”. To counter this propaganda, we have to explain that peace is not just stopping the war. If peace comes with the surrender of Ukraine, or if it ends up having a puppet government in Kyiv like in Belarus, we will have Ukrainian society crushed and we will see the Russian army at the Polish border.
This is against not only our values, but against our interests!
Maybe we in the EU need to do more “political pedagogy” to guarantee that European citizens understand better what their money is being used for – our collective freedom – and support our course. Because our governments have to do what people want them to do. In the end, these 122 billion euros come from the pockets of these people, our taxpayers.
If we lose this battle with Russian propaganda, if we don’t manage to convince them, it will not be possible to continue supporting Ukraine. But I hope that we will succeed.
Sergiy Sydorenko,
Editor, European Pravda