Portugal’s outgoing prime minister has said today that one of the Russian president’s “biggest strategic defeats” in the conflict with Ukraine has been that he thought he would succeed in dividing the European Union but has ended up doing the opposite. In declarations that suggest Mr Costa is not planning to take any kind of back seat from the political front line, he told reporters as he ended a meeting of the European Council in Brussels today: “I think that President Putin’s biggest strategic defeat so far has certainly been the Ukrainian people’s ability to resist, the second biggest was being convinced that he was going to get a divided EU and, on the contrary, what has resulted is a European Union that has shown itself to be quite united and capable of reacting”.
Putin’s hope of divided EU his ‘greatest strategic defeat’, says outgoing PM
António Costa's social media pages have been showing him to be more on a mission than in Brussels to say his political goodbyes. Image: @antoniocostapm
