Borrell warns that the neighborhood of Europe “is on fire” and advocates stopping all crises equally

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Borrell warns that China’s technological dependence “is greater today” than Russia’s energy dependence

Jan. 19 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The high representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, has warned this Thursday that the neighborhood of Europe “is on fire”, beyond a war in Ukraine, whose “shock waves” have been felt throughout the world in terms of high energy and food prices.

“Our neighborhood is on fire. Crisis in Moldova and Serbia, Kosovo, Syria, Libya,” he said at an event organized by IE University in Madrid. Borrell has endorsed the words of the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, when he has warned of the great challenges that the world faces beyond Ukraine and the need to tackle all equally.

Borrell has reported that at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he immediately understood that “history had changed”, that a “new page” of it was opening and that this decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin would bring consequences for the entire world. world, especially for Ukrainians.

In this sense, he has welcomed the prompt reaction of the EU, which so far has allocated some 50,000 million euros in military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. “The bill is high, but much more for the Ukrainians who are losing a lot of people and their country being destroyed,” he lamented.

“We have to be sure that Ukraine will prevail,” stressed Borrell, who has once again lamented, as on previous occasions, the dependence on fossil fuels that come from Russia. “This didn’t start with the war, but the war has made it much worse,” he said.

“The price of energy is the price of freedom. The Ukrainians are paying it. What we had was an excessive dependence on Russian gas,” acknowledged the head of European diplomacy, who cited as EU member states, like Hungary or Germany, they had Russia as almost the only supplier.

“We learned that the strategic intentions of the suppliers and the regime nature of the country that supplies you matter a lot, but we have been very naive because after the invasion of Crimea in 2014, we continued to increase our dependence on Russian gas and even built new pipelines.” , It has been recognized.

However, he stressed that in “a very short time” Europe has managed to get rid of this dependence on Russian gas. “It was our Achilles heel,” she has said. “Germany today does not use a single unit of energy from Russia and by the end of the year, all European countries will have cut off all dependency,” she confided.

The exception may be Hungary, either for “political reasons” or for being “a landlocked country”, Borrell has qualified, who, on the other hand, has predicted a poor scenario for Russia thanks to the economic sanctions that do not stop arrive not only from Europe, but from other partners such as the United States or Canada.

“Most of Russia’s gas fields will be depleted. They have a lot, but in deep water in the Arctic and they don’t have the technology to supply these fields. If they want to develop a new gas field, they need Western technology. And for the moment They don’t have it and they won’t have it,” he said.

Unlike at the start of the war, when the authorities asked the population to consume less energy, not only to deal with climate change but also to counteract energy dependence, Borrell now defends that “the solution will not come from using less energy.”

“Maybe for us, who use a lot of energy. But in Africa, there are 600 million people who have never seen an electric light bulb, who don’t know what electricity is, and 40 percent of humanity has never used the Internet.” Borrell has said, who apologizes to these countries for not being able to have alternatives to fossil fuels due to a lack of infrastructure and financing for renewables.

“If we want people to increase their level of well-being, we have to spend a lot more energy. The question is where this energy is going to come from,” Borrell questioned.

CHINA, THE OTHER GREAT CHALLENGE

The other big question of Borrell’s intervention has been the challenge that China poses for the West, since the Asian giant has become one of the main commercial partners in spaces that until a few decades ago were alien to it and the main technological competitor. from, for example, the United States, which uses “national security policy” arguments to prohibit its companies from trading with Chinese ones.

“The United States talks about a decisive decade ahead, and in ten years they want to prevent China from becoming number one in technology. This will require accelerating domestic innovation and increasing subsidies,” Borrell said.

However, Borrell has qualified that the objective is not to end China — “it would be impossible anyway,” he admits –, but rather “to try to control the dependency” that can drag on the Asian country.

“Cooperation with China will continue, but it will be controlled. And this is the fight. (…) Our technological dependence today is greater than our energy dependence on Russia,” he acknowledged.