February 18 A meeting of the heads of the Foreign Affairs Commissions of V4 and France was held in Budapest. Relations between the EU, Belarus, Russia, the Western Balkans and Turkey were discussed, as well as transatlantic relations; EU-Africa, EU-China.

Russia and Belarus are dictatorships hostile to the EU, the former being the protector and de facto superior of the latter. The Kremlin's policy is destabilization and military aggression against its neighbors from Moldova and Georgia to Ukraine. Russia is also threatening its neighbouring EU member states with military aggression - from Denmark, Finland and Sweden, parts of whose territories (islands in the Baltic Sea) have been the object of staff games and large-scale military manoeuvres based on the scenario of their conquest, and conducted on a biannual basis for a dozen years or so), through the Baltic States, to Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, which are regarded as Russia's natural sphere of influence, where the Kremlin wishes to restore its dominance.

NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US

Seeking a settlement with Russia by satisfying some of its demands at the expense of Central Europe and at the cost of abandoning the values on which the North Atlantic Alliance is built, including the right of each nation to freely choose its alliance and its own political system, is a reason for deep disappointment on the EU's eastern flank and in Ukraine. The practice of the superpowers deciding the fate of other sovereign nations without them and over their heads, i.e. repeating procedures known from Munich of 1938, is for obvious reasons unacceptable.As for the Western Balkans, depriving them of the prospect of EU membership creates a political void, which on the basis of the disillusionment of their societies will be filled by forces hostile to the EU including Russia. This threatens to destabilize the region and the Kremlin will fuel old conflicts in order to instrumentalize them later in relations with the EU and NATO.

The U.S. military and political presence in Europe has become the foundation on which trust was built between France and Germany after centuries of war. The theses about the EU being ready to compete with the US, Russia and China that we have heard in this context are detached from reality, and the current Ukrainian crisis has clearly demonstrated this.