EU says it will continue to raise Russia’s consistent breaches of int’l law in Georgia, Ukraine

The European Union says it will continue to raise Russia’s consistent breaches of international law in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere prominently, including through initiatives with like-minded partners. 

In the recent document on the relations with Russia, the EU said that the Russian leadership uses ‘a variety of instruments to influence, interfere in, weaken or even seek to destabilise’ the EU and its member states, as well as the Western Balkans and Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries.

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EaP is a joint initiative involving the EU, its member states and six Eastern European partners: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.

As part of these efforts, it continues to invest heavily in its ability to control and influence the information space inside and outside its borders”, the document reads. 

It meanwhile notes that Russia undertakes ‘direct military and hybrid actions’ in the unresolved conflicts that it feeds in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, as well as in the EU’s southern neighbourhood, in Syria and Libya in particular, and beyond. 

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Noting that the EU ‘continues to offer closer relations’ to its Eastern partners ‘for prosperity, good neighbourliness, and reforms’, the document says that a well-functioning EaP is ‘a tool to enhance European stability, security and prosperity’.

The Eastern partners have a full, sovereign right to shape the breadth and depth of their relations with the EU and other international players freely. Still, the Russian government continues its confrontational policy, employing soft and hard policy tools to exert pressure”, the EU says in its joint document. 

The EU has underscored as well that it continued to counter the Russian government’s attempts ‘to portray itself as a mediator and not a party to the territorial conflicts affecting Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova’. 

It also pursued its non-recognition policy regarding the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula and the Russian-supported ‘independence’ of the Georgian occupied  regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali (South Ossetia).