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Bratislava – The European Union should not interfere in common defense. It should be commanded by the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO), because two commands will not provide defense. Minister of Defense Robert Kaliňák (Smer-SD) stated this in an end-of-year interview for TASR.
The head of the Defense Ministry considers the possible creation of a joint European army to be a significant federalization element.
“Either we are in NATO and then we don’t need it, or we are in Europe,” said Robert Kaliňák.
In addition, the minister reiterated that Ukraine will never be in NATO. According to him, it will also have a problem becoming a member of the European Union. The group of states helping Ukraine, the so-called coalition of the willing, has, in his view, come up with nothing.
“Did it send any soldier? It didn’t. Of course not,” declared Kaliňák. He added that Ukraine had a chance to end the war in 2022.
Opposition MP of the National Council of the Slovak Republic Juraj Krúpa (SaS), in response to the defense minister’s statement, pointed out that automatically rejecting a common European defense structure is “strange.” Krúpa added that several politicians of today’s Slovak governing coalition in the past preferred a European army over NATO.
“A few years ago they were saying that a European army is needed and NATO is not needed, those were people in Smer, those were people in SNS and in Hlas. These people today say they don’t want anything like that, so obviously something is going on there and it will probably be related precisely to Russian influence,” Krúpa thinks. As the MP added, a European army is a chimera, nobody is building it. Nobody is creating parallel structures either, because there is the NATO structure. (2 January)
“Either we are in NATO and then we don’t need a common European defense, or we are in Europe.” Robert Kaliňák.