(Bloomberg) -- The European Union must remain committed to its policy that any talks about ending the war in Ukraine should be led by the government in Kyiv, Portuguese Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel said.
“It will be Ukraine who decides how a peace process should be organized,” Rangel said in an interview in Lisbon on Tuesday. “It’s fundamental that the EU remains firm in the idea that if there are peace talks and a peace process, which is highly desirable, it has to be done with respect for the plan defined by Ukraine, which is the invaded state.”
That position has been challenged by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who’s said he will continue his self-styled “peace mission,” despite criticism from the EU that he has overstepped his role as the holder of the bloc’s rotating presidency.
The EU needs to join China and, assuming Donald Trump’s return to power, the US to press Russia and Ukraine to start peace negotiations, Orban said in a radio interview on July 19.
The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Monday he plans on moving an August meeting of the bloc’s foreign and defense ministers from Budapest to Brussels to protest Orban’s diplomatic forays.
The meeting is traditionally convened by the country that holds the EU’s six-month rotating presidency, but member states have been angered by the visits that Orban made in recent weeks to Moscow, Beijing, and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
“We will never abdicate from respecting the United Nations charter, the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine,” Rangel, 56, said. “If we open the precedent of the law of the strongest — that there could be a state that through force changes borders that are defined and recognized internationally — we will create the conditions for multiplying conflicts at the global level.”
The Portuguese minister said he doesn’t think there will be a “substantial change” in military support for Ukraine even if Trump becomes president again, citing commitments from NATO, the EU and individual countries to keep backing Kyiv.
“In the last NATO summit, what we saw was the creation of a stable framework not just for military support for Ukraine but also there was the definition of financial support for military purposes, which is about $40 billion annually, which is highly significant aid,” Rangel said. “These are guarantees for the future. There is already an institutional and legal framework that is binding in many cases.”
NATO’s European members have been increasing their defense spending, a trend which Rangel sees continuing. Portugal plans to meet a NATO requirement for defense spending to reach 2% of gross domestic product by 2029, up from about 1.55% this year.
Rangel said different US administrations, not only Trump’s, have called for increased contributions from European allies.
“The requirement to reach 2% and to have an equitable share of the costs of building defense and dissuasion capacity is a constant in US administrations,” the minister said. “Each president will have his style, but none has abandoned that demand.”
Rangel also said Portugal’s relationship with the US doesn’t depend on the governments or the presidents who are on either side of the Atlantic. “It’s a stable, fundamental relationship.”
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