The Ukrainian President must meet on Thursday the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, after his visit to London then in Paris, Wednesday.
by Virginie Malingre (Brussels, Bureau European)
For security reasons, the information will only be confirmed at the last moment, when it is about to land on Belgian soil. But, unless a setback, Volodymyr Zelensky will go to Brussels on Thursday, February 9, during a meeting of European heads of state and government. The Ukrainian President should take advantage of this trip to intervene before the European Parliament, whose president, Roberta Metsola, was the first, among the leaders of the community institutions, to go to kyiv after the start of the Russian assault, on 24 February 2022.
Since the start of the war, and before his surprise visit to the United Kingdom and then in France, where he was expected on Wednesday evening, Volodymyr Zelensky left his country until December 2022. After the US MI elections -Mandat, he went to Washington to help Joe Biden convince the Congress to continue American aid to Ukraine. As the Ukrainian president explained on February 3, in kyiv, where the UK-European Union summit was held, “I went to the United States to have money and express my gratitude”.
In Brussels, we had moderately appreciated that Volodymyr Zelensky gave the premiere to Washington. Since then, Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, had set out to bring him to the European capital. On January 19, when he went to kyiv for the third time, he had pleaded his cause with his host, offering him to make the trip on February 9, when he was planned that a summit of the twenty Seven stands. “Charles Michel pleaded for February 9. He wanted to bring Zelensky back to Brussels as a trophy,” recently told us a European diplomat.
The United Kingdom first
“There are significant risks to go to Brussels that Charles knows well,” said Volodymyr Zelensky on February 3 in kyiv. And these risks are all the more important since the chairman of the council was not the only one to request the presence of his Ukrainian counterpart on his land, in case he leaves his country. “London also wants its share. And why not Paris and Warsaw?”, Explained this same diplomat a few days ago. Very anti -Russian, Poland ardently defends the Ukrainian cause. And “Zelensky really likes Macron, who received it in Paris in April 2019, during the electoral campaign, when Zelensky had a problem of credibility and the United States bet on Poroshenko”, details another European diplomat. The United Kingdom was finally the first served.
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