João Gomes Cravinho doesn’t pull punches as elections draw near
With Portugal’s elections ‘wide open’ – and no current minister assured of their jobs beyond March – the country’s head of diplomacy, João Gomes Cravinho, is not pulling his punches.
In Brussels today, he has told Lusa that Russian president Vladimir Putin “doesn’t just want a piece of Ukrainian territory”, he wants to “destroy” the European Union – and “that is why it is crucial that we do not allow him to win in Ukraine.
“If we can’t demonstrate in Ukraine our determination to call for what we value, then it’s only natural that there will be a break-up of the European project and that’s purely what this is about,” he warned.
Asked if he still believes in a Ukrainian victory, two years on since the Russian invasion, and in the wake of the strategic ‘loss’ of the city of Avdiivka, João Gomes Cravinho said: “I strongly believe it and Ukraine has already shown that when it has the necessary means, it can repel the invaders”.
‘Necessary means’, here, being the key factor (Ukraine is desperate for more military hardware).
According to the minister, Russia has demonstrated “a high level of military incompetence and the territorial gains it has made are very small” but they have been made “at a cost that no decent regime would accept of thousands and thousands of deaths for every square metre of territory.”
Regarding last Friday’s death of Putin’s ‘adversary’ Alexei Navalny, he said: “We cannot have any illusions about what has happened. When Putin kills Navalny, he does so by looking at the rest of the world and saying: ‘look what I can do’. It is the nature of the regime that is being exposed here. And he also does it by looking at the Russian people themselves, saying: ‘Beware because this is the fate of those who want to oppose the regime’.
“When we are confronted with a dictatorship like the one in Russia, when we are confronted with the implacability of a dictator who destroys all his adversaries and opponents, who is afraid of them and therefore feels the need to destroy them – whether by forcing them into exile, imprisoning them or killing them – (…) I believe that what we have to do is say (that) we will not accept this dictator coming to trouble Europe.”
As to the EU’s ‘enlargement’ (new candidates include Ukraine, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey, Moldova and Georgia), Gomes Cravinho accepted that it will be a lengthy process, requiring “some creativity” – and dependent, no doubt, on how the next few years pan out.
Source material: LUSA
