What Arnaud spoke about.

Monsieur le Président, Madame la Présidente, Monsieur le Secrétaire d’État, il n’est jamais trop tard pour se réveiller, même si la guerre russe en Ukraine et les spéculations sur une possible défaillance de l’allié américain ne datent pas d’aujourd’hui, ni même d’il y a deux ans, mais d’il y a déjà dix ans. Since then, we have had a lot of announcement effects, a lot of incantations, a few action

Mr President, the Caucasus, in the shadow of its major Russian, Turkish and Iranian neighbours, focuses on strategic issues that the European Union cannot ignore or deal with simplistically or opportunistically. Nagorno-Karabakh, in particular, is one of those territories where history, international law, demographics and religions do not coincide and are, alas, an inexhaustible source of conflict

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for your positive and constructive contributions. I believe that indeed we have an interesting text here because it is balanced, it goes in the right direction, it promotes genuinely European interests, it makes a clear distinction between the assets that a number of Member States retain (although we must be aware that there is sti

Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted today, even at this late hour, that Parliament is expressing, through this consensual report and in the same terms as the Council, the Commission and the European External Action Service, a clear, coherent and ambitious position on the security and defence component of the European space policy. Thank you to all those who contributed to the produc

No, I hear, this was not a challenge on my part, because I understand the difficulty of the task. What strikes me a lot is that many of us have visited all these missions, especially in the Sahelian countries, and each time, beyond the very down-to-earth training of certain military or security units, we are told that people are being placed to provide strategic advice. So people are supposedly pl

Mr. Representative, there are many questions about what is happening, especially in the Sahelian States. I would like to ask you a rather technical question, which is directly linked to the mandates of the European missions and operations that have been deployed in different countries: Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic have all seen coups d’état. All these countries have seen the Europe

Madam President, just over a week before the invasion of Ukraine, the Commission presented its communication on defence, which was already quite ambitious at the time, even though your prerogatives in this area are limited. In particular, you mentioned very concrete avenues, such as VAT exemptions or incentives for the financing of collaborative programmes and cooperative purchases within the Euro

Madam President, two weeks ago to the day, just before the Versailles summit, I spoke modestly in Strasbourg to remind this House that, in European defence, we do not need to reinvent the wheel, warm water or hot water – as we want – and that everything existed. We have all the tools at our disposal. While welcoming some initiatives, such as the plentiful and welcome use of the European Peace Faci

Madam President, Prime Minister, High Representative, for 30 years and the Yugoslav wars, there has been no shortage of opportunities to hear that the time for Europe has finally come. And yet, in the field of defence, progress has never been commensurate with the announcement effects. Today, the Russian aggression against Ukraine is ushering us into a new era and Europe must quickly draw the cons

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, there are events that so brutally break all established rules and so staggeringly defy any rationality that they push the world into unknown areas. By deliberately and grossly attacking a free and sovereign European state, Vladimir Putin alone created one of these decisive events. In doing so, he underestimated Ukrainian national sentiment. He underestimated the

Mr President, Mr High Representative, ladies and gentlemen, for a dozen years now, there has been no shortage of alarm signals, the famous ones: From Mali to Libya, from Syria to Ukraine, from American isolationism to Russian revisionism, from uninhibited Chinese power and other regional powers that play on borders and international laws, we can say that there have been many opportunities for Euro

Madam President, Mr President of the Republic, a parliamentary assembly is always sensitive to the magic of the verb and you are a talented magician, Mr President of the Republic. But there comes a time when the incantations, the announcement effects, the sleeve effects end up getting tired and, above all, fail to mask a number of ambiguities and contradictions. Thus, who believes between the pres

Madam President, we have all legitimately felt a lot of emotion when we saw the images of the tragedy in Kabul in recent weeks, and even more emotion, obviously, when we thought of the Afghan civilian victims, but also of all the young Western soldiers, particularly European soldiers, who have fallen by the thousands for 20 years in Afghanistan to try to make this country more democratic, more fre