PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron will discuss Brexit with Britain's new Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom he has invited to visit in the next few weeks, an official from Macron's Elysee office said on Friday.
The two leaders spoke on Thursday, and Macron's talks with Johnson would be in regard to the demands of the European Union about Brexit, the official added.
On entering Downing Street on Wednesday, Johnson set up a showdown with the EU by vowing to negotiate a new deal and threatening that, if the bloc refused, he would take Britain out of the EU on Oct. 31 without a deal.
One of the main areas of contention between Britain and the EU over the terms of Brexit has been the Irish backstop.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said this week there would be no withdrawal agreement or subsequent trade pact with Britain if it did not accept the backstop.
The backstop is an insurance policy to provisionally keep Britain in a customs union with the EU, pending a better solution, to prevent the return of a hard border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker also told Johnson this week that a divorce deal agreed by predecessor Theresa May last November was the best and only deal with the European Union.
French President Macron to discuss Brexit with UK PM Johnson in coming weeks
French President Macron to discuss Brexit with UK PM Johnson in coming weeks
- Johnson set up a showdown with the EU by vowing to negotiate a new deal and threatening that, if the bloc refused, he would take Britain out of the EU on Oct. 31 without a deal
- One of the main areas of contention between Britain and the EU over the terms of Brexit has been the Irish backstop
Poland slow to counter Russia’s ‘existential threat’: general
- The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size
- Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039
WARSAW: Russia poses an “existential threat” to Poland and its military is lagging, the country’s armed forces chief warned senior officials on Wednesday.
Poland, the largest country on NATO’s eastern flank and a neighbor of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, is the western alliance’s largest spender in relative terms.
This year, the country is allocating 4.8 percent of its GDP to defense, just shy of the alliance’s five percent target to be met by 2035.
However, that record defense spending was not enough to “make up for nearly three decades of chronic underfunding of the armed forces,” General Wieslaw Kukula, chief of the general staff, argued at the meeting, which included top officers, the defense minister and Poland’s president.
The general highlighted a low “pace of technical modernization,” compared to increases in the army’s size.
Kukula said the Polish army should reach 500,000 soldiers by 2039, compared with around 210,000 at present.
As a result of a lack of updates, some new Polish units “are not achieving combat readiness,” due to insufficient equipment, rather than a personnel shortage, the general argued.
Meanwhile, he added, “the Russian Federation remains an existential threat to Poland.”
Russia “is constantly reorganizing its forces, drawing on the lessons from its aggression in Ukraine, and building up the capacity for a conventional conflict with NATO countries,” he stressed.
Poland is to receive 43.7 billion euros ($51,5 billion) in loans under the European Union’s Security Action For Europe (SAFE) scheme, designed to strengthen Europe’s defensive capabilities.
Warsaw plans to use these funds to boost domestic arms production.
The Polish government claims that Poland will be able to access SAFE finance even if President Karol Nawrocki — backed by Poland’s conservative-nationalist opposition — vetos a law setting out domestic arrangements for its implementation.
Law and Justice (PiS) — the main opposition party — argues that SAFE could become a new tool for Brussels to place undue pressure on Poland, thanks to a planned mechanism for monitoring the funds, which they claim risks undermining Polish sovereignty.
