DHAKA: European Union leaders gather in Brussels Saturday to hammer out a robust response to Russian incursions in east Ukraine and to appoint new candidates to key EU posts, including a replacement for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
The 28 heads of state and government will gather for talks amid reports that Russian combat troops are now fighting inside east Ukraine, reports france24.com.
EU states toughened their sanctions against Russia five weeks ago, but with Moscow now acting as a direct and hostile force inside Ukraine the EU is under pressure to ratchet up its response.
Ukraine’s embattled government has openly asked the EU to help militarily, and a new request will be presented to the Brussels summit by Romanian president Traian Basescu. But Ukraine’s hopes are likely to go unanswered, as few if any EU nations seem willing to go to war for Kiev, which is a member neither of the European bloc nor of NATO.
‘Such behaviour cannot remain without consequences,’ German chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday amid reports from NATO that ‘well over’ a thousand Russian soldiers were now taking part in battles inside Ukraine.
British prime minister David Cameron urged Russia to halt its intervention and scale back its involvement in Ukraine. If it does not, he said, Russia ‘should be in no doubt that there will be further consequences’.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has been added as a guest at Saturday’s talks, when he will share the latest developments in Ukraine after one-on-one meetings with EU Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso and EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy.
Poroshenko has been a regular presence among EU leaders since taking office earlier this year. In June he attended an EU summit to sign the trade agreement that his predecessor had reneged on, sparking weeks of protest that eventually led to his ouster.
French president François Hollande, meanwhile, is in a push to add economic policy to the agenda, in an effort to seek an alternative to the balanced budget requirements that rule EU policy, championed by the bloc’s largest economy Germany.
BDST: 1431 HRS, AUG 30, 2014
