High representative Kaja Kallas will travel to London this week for talks with defence officials while an EU-UK summit is to be held in mid-May.
The European Commission is “intensively” trying to get member states to give it a mandate to negotiate a security and defence partnership with the United Kingdom, a top EU official said on Monday.
Negotiating such a partnership requires the unanimous approval of all 27 member states, but some countries, like France, have already signalled they want any security pact to be included in a wider reset in relations, seemingly returning to the Brexit mantra that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’.
For the EU’s external action service (EEAS), increased cooperation on security and defence with the UK “is a must” because the current geopolitical context is “dramatically” different from when the two sides struck the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) that lays out the terms of their relationship, its Managing Director for Europe, Matti Maasikas, told lawmakers on Monday.
“What could we do more? This being the EU you need the legal framework, you need legal basis to do things and since the foreign policy declaration was left out of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, we need to find new ways and a new basis for our cooperation,” Maasikas told lawmakers from Brussels and London gathered at the European Parliament for an EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly.
“The Security and defence partnership could be one of those instruments, should be if you ask me, if you ask the High Representative.”
“For that, the High Representative needs the mandate from the EU Council, meaning the consent of all member states, the discussions are intensively ongoing to obtain this mandate,” he added.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who came to power last summer, has been pushing for a security and defence pact which he said last month should focus on research and development, military mobility across Europe, greater cooperation on missions and operations, and industrial collaboration.
Nick Thomas-Symonds, Britain’s minister for EU relations, told the same joint parliamentary assembly on Monday that the UK is “ready to negotiate” while Catriona Mace, the foreign and development policy director at the UK Mission to the EU, said that “the status quo should not be the extent of our ambition”.
“We already work closely on our collective security,” she said. “We must do more together.”
Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to launch talks with Russia on the end of its war in Ukraine has accelerated the rapprochement between the UK and EU member states with a flurry of leaders’ meetings in various formats held over the past five weeks to discuss European defence and security guarantees for Ukraine.
On this topic, France and the UK are more in lockstep, having both indicated their readiness to send troops to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping mission following a negotiated truce between Moscow and Kyiv.
High representative Kaja Kallas, who has tabled an initiative for a coalition of the willing to provide military support worth up to €40 billion in the short term to Ukraine, is scheduled to visit the UK on Wednesday where she will meet Chief of the Defence Staff Tony Radakin.
“I have high hopes on very fruitful discussions on all the issues,” Maasikas told lawmakers, “on the pragmatic cooperation that goes on, and also on widening the basis for this cooperation.”
