The President of the European Commission announced this Wednesday the creation of a joint task force with NATO to assess the weakness of critical infrastructure and improve its resilience against adversaries who pose a growing “threat to democracies”.
“Today we are going to launch a ‘task force’ between the European Union [UE] and NATO [Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte] for the resilience of critical infrastructure,” Ursula von der Leyen announced at the start of a discussion on defense and security at the College of European Commissioners in Brussels.
The President of the European Commission explained that this joint ‘task force’ will be made up of “specialists from NATO and the EU and will work to identify critical threats to critical infrastructures, look at the strategic vulnerabilities they have and key principles develop for their resilience”.
Ursula von der Leyen specified that the ‘task force’ will look at four pillars: transport, energy, digital and space.
good to have @JensStoltenberg with us on our @EU_Commission seminar.
With the joint statement we signed yesterday, we are taking our partnership to the next level.
And today we are already doing more work to strengthen our resilience and defenses. https://t.co/FZONGrOkpb
– Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) January 11, 2023
The EU Member States and the countries that are part of the military alliance will receive the conclusions as soon as the evaluations are completed.
“We witnessed the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. We must be prepared for this new type of threat,” von der Leyen argued, flanked by NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg.
This kind of threat is the result of a “growing geopolitical competition”, the President of the European Commission added: “Our adversaries are using all possible means to challenge us and weaken our security. They threaten our transparency and our democracies.”
Ursula von der Leyen, in her speech, did not mention Russia or China, identified on Tuesday as the main opponents of the EU and NATO in signing a joint statement, the third.
Jens Stoltenberg insisted on the idea that he is trying to strengthen with the EU member states and the countries that are part of NATO: the partnership between the two organizations “is more important than ever”.
After calling on countries such as France or Germany to continue to support Ukraine against the Russian invasion, the military alliance’s secretary general agreed with von der Leyen on the need to strengthen critical infrastructures, which are “a crucial part” of Western democracies. .
“We want to understand together how we can make our infrastructure technologies more resilient,” he added.
“Resilience” was the word used most in the short speeches made by the two leaders at the start of a seminar precisely to discuss European defense and security.
Source: DN
