UK prime minister Rishi Sunak will on Thursday urge European leaders to work together to defend their frontiers against irregular migration, as he joins about 50 counterparts at a summit just 21km from the Ukraine border.
Sunak will travel to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, for the second meeting of the European Political Community, which is set to be dominated by discussion of the security threat posed by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ahead of his trip, Sunak said he would ensure that “tackling illegal migration is firmly on the international agenda”, as he hopes to stem the flow of migrants across Europe.
“Europe is facing unprecedented threats at our borders, from Putin’s utter contempt of other countries’ sovereignty to the rise in organised immigration crime,” he said, adding that they could only be addressed by the continent’s “governments and institutions working closely together”.
The 47-country EPC is the brainchild of French president Emmanuel Macron, bringing together EU member states and other countries including the UK, Turkey and Ukraine to discuss multiple security issues in a less formal setting than the EU or Nato.
For Sunak, the EPC is a means of re-engaging with the EU after the bitter rows over Brexit; it is also a chance to link international engagement with his promise to “stop the boats” carrying migrants across the English Channel.
Sunak will announce in Chisinau the start of talks on a new returns agreement with Moldova and a new partnership with Bulgaria to undermine the business model of people smugglers.
Meanwhile, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev described Britain as an “eternal enemy” on Wednesday after foreign secretary James Cleverly said Kyiv had the right to attack military targets in Russia on the grounds of self defence.
Asked during a press conference in Estonia on Tuesday about drone attacks on a residential neighbourhood of Moscow for which Kyiv has not claimed responsibility, Cleverly declined to comment.
However, he said Ukraine had “the right to project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia’s ability to project force into Ukraine itself”, noting that striking “military targets beyond its own border” was “internationally recognised as being legitimate as part of a nation’s self-defence”.
In response, Medvedev, now deputy chair of Russia’s security council, wrote on Twitter that Britain was leading “an undeclared war against Russia” and suggested that any British officials who assisted Kyiv’s war effort could be seen as legitimate military targets.
Michael Clarke, visiting professor of war studies at King’s College London, said that although Cleverly appeared to have been caught off guard, he “got the wording right” by stressing that the only legitimate Russian targets were military targets, which would not include the residential outskirts of Moscow.
Clarke added that while Medvedev was “not a credible person these days”, his rhetoric highlighted a widespread sentiment in Russia that “you can get at the west by insulting the British, without fear of any retaliation, which you can’t do with Washington”.
James Nixey, director of the Russia-Eurasia programme at Chatham House, a think-tank, said Cleverly’s intervention reflected how much closer the UK’s position on Moscow was to the Baltic and Nordic nations than to France and Germany, which have “always looked to be more accommodating to Russia”.
