Debate: Debriefing of the European Council meeting in Paris on  March  - Preparation of the European Council meeting - March
Date: WEDNESDAY, 23 MARCH 2022
Speaker: Maroš Šefčovič
Language: EN

If you allow me to reiterate, in unwavering terms, the European Union stands by Ukraine and its people. And I think it was very clear from today’s debate in this House that we all share a determination to remain united, that we will continue to work on further coordinated political, financial, material and humanitarian support to Ukraine; that we are standing ready to move quickly with further coordinated sanctions and close the loopholes, as some of the honourable Members have been highlighting how important it is, and add all of those to the sanctions which we already adopted and which we see that are having a crippling effect on the economy of Russia.  A lot of the honourable Members brought very emotional, and rightly so, stories of refugees fleeing the Ukrainian war. And I have to say that we approach it with the same emotion in the European Commission. Therefore, you saw that today we’ve been adopting new rules to make sure that these 3.4 million people, so far, who are overwhelmingly women and children, would have proper shelter and proper protection. That we would make it easier for them by our welcoming reception, but also making sure that their kids go back to school as quickly as possible. That everyone who needs it will get proper healthcare anywhere in the European Union and therefore we guaranteed 10 000 beds – and I really would like to thank all the Member States for being so solid there in showing the possibility to treat patients in all the hospitals across the European Union. That the housing will be provided for those who need it and that we will protect the children more than anyone else.  Many of the honourable Members have been referring to the very important issues of energy – our dependence on fossil fuels coming from Russia and the need to reshape our system as quickly as possible. I am glad that here we are not starting from scratch and I was working with many of you on the Energy Union in the previous mandate. And I have to say that your work, your support, was so crucial for us having now the world interconnected, an energy security network, and it helps us a lot in these very difficult geopolitical circumstances.  But we are working further on increasing diversity of the supplies, having more LNG in our system and we are working with all partners. And just last week I visited the United States, where I felt a strong desire to help us, to supply us with LNG in quantities that Europe would need.  But I agree with all of you that we need much more coordinated EU policy on gas: on buying, on storing, on responding to any supply disruption. And to this end, we stand ready to create a task force on common gas purchases at European level to make the best possible deals with this and put our purchasing power of the European Union being the number one, top-class client in the world. I believe that the leaders tomorrow will give a green light to this solution, and the task force will be up and ready to make sure that we will secure those deals for European businesses and for European consumers.  I also recognise the need to tackle high energy prices, which are hitting our households and businesses and therefore we adopted a series of options for the leaders to debate tomorrow. What can we do with reduced VAT? How can we use the vouchers for the most vulnerable consumers? And do we want to go in the direction of the possibility to cap electricity and gas prices, as well as using the new temporary crisis framework for state aid? All these are on the table, and we believe that after leaders’ deliberations tomorrow, we will be able to proceed very quickly with concrete proposals.  To answer the honourable Member, I totally agree with him that the cleanest energy is the energy which is saved. Therefore, we see this as an opportunity to accelerate green-energy build-up, to reduce energy consumption and increase energy efficiency. I am very glad that now we have legally binding targets when it comes to energy efficiency and by 2030 we would increase it by 36-39% and reduce our energy consumption by 9%.  To conclude, let me once again say that we are absolutely united more than ever to support the Ukrainian people, and I’m sure after what we have seen over the last four weeks, what I’ve witnessed in the debate today, that the brave people of Ukraine will prevail and Ukraine will come victorious out of this atrocious war.