Germany’s newly inaugurated Chancellor Olaf Scholz was set to meet other EU heads of state at his first Brussels summit on Thursday.
Russian antagonism on the Ukrainian border will likely dominate the agenda after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as European Council President Charles Michel on Wednesday. He will hold talks with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday.
Scholz’s participation in the European Council meeting comes the day after his inaugural address to the Bundestag.
He made his first visit as chancellor to Brussels last week, before heading to Warsaw amid ongoing tensions between key Russian ally Belarus and Poland.
State-sponsored murder in Berlin
Berlin’s own tense relations with Moscow reached a peak on Wednesday after a court sentenced a Russian national to life imprisonment for the murder of an ethnic Chechen in a park in the German capital in 2019.
Prosecutors had said the man was working on orders from the Russian state security agency FSB.
Germany’s new Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the point-blank shooting a “murder by state contract” and spoke with both the Russian ambassador to Germany Sergey Nechayev and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.
Berlin expelled two Russian diplomats in response to the verdict later on Wednesday. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Sakharova later said that Berlin’s “unfriendly stance” would be met with an “appropriate response.”
EU to discuss sanctions
The EU was already planning to discuss the potential sanctions it could impose should Russia pursue aggressive actions towards Ukraine.
Zelenskyy on Wednesday called on European leaders to introduce sanctions immediately rather than waiting for something to happen.
Russia occupied and annexed Crimea — a region of Ukraine that juts into the Black Sea — in 2014 and has reportedly been supporting pro-Russian separatist fighters in the eastern Donbas region ever since.
Moscow is intent on keeping Ukraine from getting too close to the EU and NATO, having repeatedly called for the possibility of accession to be taken off the table.
Both EU and NATO leaders have rejected the demand to rule out potential membership, but also say that Kyiv is still a long way off joining either organization.
Edited by: Mark Hallam.
Olaf Scholz heads to first EU summit with fresh Russia tension in tow
Source: Pinoy Pop News
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