Brussels is scrambling to look like a big player in ending the war in Ukraine, but in doing so has again revealed its total lack of unity.
Industrial Strategy Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné claims that the European Union on Monday offered Kyiv a minerals deal to counter that made by the U.S. He said this would be “mutually beneficial”—a “win-win partnership.” In other words, that it would be better than any deal presented by US president Donald Trump.
But much like talks of a Paris-fronted ‘parallel-NATO,’ the ‘deal’ appears to amount to little more than a fantasy.
Hours after Séjourné’s grand claim—and, more importantly, as it emerged that the U.S. and Ukraine had agreed to their own minerals deal—Ursula von der Leyen’s lackeys denied that Brussels had ever made an offer.
“There is no proposal,” said Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier, suggesting that Séjourné was instead referring to the implementation of an existing 2021 memorandum of understanding. This made only vague promises about helping to develop Ukraine’s mining infrastructure in exchange for European access.
It is strange, then, that the commissioner’s team should have described Monday’s minerals offer as “a new proposal” (emphasis added). It hardly needs spelling out that a proposal cannot simultaneously be new and from 2021.
Overlapping statements make it—perhaps intentionally—impossible to establish the truth of this matter. But recent such floundering makes it at least reasonable to presume that a deal was in fact presented to Ukraine, and only later denied in order to save face after Kyiv instead signed up to Trump’s plan.
Or there really was never an EU-Ukraine minerals plan, in which case French commissioner Séjourné was simply following the lead of his national president, Emmanuel Macron, and grandstanding about unattainable aims.
