UEF IN THE PRESS | What else has to happen?

This article was written by Guy Verhofstadt, President of the European Movement International, Former MEP and Former Prime Minister of Belgium; Domènec Ruiz Devesa, President of the Union of European Federalists and Former MEP; and Enrique Barón Crespo former President of the European Parliament published on the 06 March 2025 in the weekly magazine El Pais, about the need for the United States of Europe to stop the TrumPutin axis.

Read the article in Spanish here: LINK.

A little over a month has passed since his inauguration as president, and he has already made it very clear that the United States of Trump are not our allies. Let's review: his imperialist statements about the Panama Canal, Canada, or Greenland; the tariff wars; his direct dialogue with Putin, a bloody dictator responsible for the most serious war of aggression in Europe since 1945; the attack of Vice President Vance on European democracy; the insinuations of the Secretary of Defense about the end of the security guarantee or the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the continent; the end of military aid to Ukraine; the probable lifting of sanctions on Russia, and the attempt to humiliate Zelensky in front of the cameras.

We see, on the other hand, the emergence of a new Trump-Putin (Trumputin) axis. It is the end of the transatlantic alliance founded in August 1941 by Churchill and Roosevelt against Nazi Germany: it is evident that we do not share the same vision of the world and we cannot trust the U.S. for the territorial defense of the EU.

What to do? Just like Great Britain in 1940, we must assume that Europe is alone in the face of a real danger and must assume its responsibility to help Ukraine, guarantee its competitiveness and security, and become a true federal power.

We propose integrating Ukraine into the EU economy (except for agriculture), signing an agreement on rare earth minerals, and intensifying our financial and military support. U.S. aid has been crucial so far, but it is not sustainable. The EU has one of the most developed economies in the world: Russia's GDP is barely equal to that of Spain. We have at least 200,000 million euros in financial assets managed by the aggressor State that we must confiscate to arm and rebuild Ukraine. Germany must provide long-range Taurus missiles, and we must eliminate any restriction on the use of weapons against Russian military objectives, deepen sanctions against the Russian petrochemical phantom, and close indirect trade through Central Asia that evades them. We must face the double geo-economic and geostrategic threat of Trumputin with a new European industrial plan financed by common debt and new own resources to cover the technological, investment, and competitiveness gap, and to boost our capacity in the defense industry with the creation of a European Armament Bank.

But we cannot guarantee our collective defense solely with the joint production of weapons. We must create a European Defense Community (EDC), with the participation of Ukraine. The new EDC will be responsible for our territorial defense as a European pillar in NATO, so that it can act independently of Washington, applying the legal bases of the Lisbon Treaty. For this, we must strengthen our political union to eliminate national vetoes through the federal reform of the Treaties proposed by the Parliament in 2023.

The undecided continue to doubt, but what more has to happen for a reaction to occur? Seeing Russian tanks at the gates of Kiev or Vilnius? We must choose between the United States of Europe or the Trumputin axis.