Sweden’s migration minister has criticized the “totally crazy” situation that allows thousands of Russian tourists to visit the EU despite Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
“I want no more nice trips to Europe while Ukrainians are dying on the battlefield.” said Johan Forssell on Thursday in Luxembourg. Sweden is leading a push to tighten visa restrictions for Russian travelers, an issue that has been in the spotlight since recent data showed Russians are increasingly returning to Europe for vacations. reported last month by Euractiv.
Now a coalition of 10 countries is leaning on the Commission to address the issue, with a letter to the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas, stressing the need for a more coherent policy.
“It has been deeply disturbing to witness increasing numbers of Russian tourists enjoying leisure trips to European beaches and European resorts while missiles and drones continue to strike civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine,” the letter, first seen by Euractivreads.
Briefing
Opening the door to the East – France and Germany have hatched a new plan to bring the Western Balkan countries and Moldova closer to the EU in a bid to inject “new dynamism” into the bloc’s enlargement. With EU leaders set to descend on Montenegro for an enlargement summit on Friday, the Franco-German push is partly an attempt to show the Balkans that they have not been left behind.
EU cloud law fails – The Commission’s cloud sovereignty proposal, formally presented on Wednesday, fails to address the risks posed by an increasingly hostile US administration to the EU economy. politicians and cloud providers are warning. While the Cloud and AI Development Act includes an obligation for EU countries to map out their public administrations’ dependencies on foreign cloud service providers, it contains no such measures for critical private sector providers such as banks and hospitals.
Plan to boost European technology – The commission will use a carrot and stick approach to make public bodies buy more European technologyaccording to Wednesday’s technological sovereignty package. The proposal also orders all public bodies across the EU to consider whether a technology company they are looking to deal with is contributing “to the development of a European cloud and AI ecosystem”.
All over Europe
Hungary’s conditions for Ukraine’s path to the EU – Hungary green light for Ukraine to start enlargement ‘group’ talks comes with strings attachedamid mutual suspicion and the prospect of a Hungarian referendum on whether Kyiv will ever join the EU club. Péter Magyar, the Hungarian prime minister, predicted that the negotiations would drag on until 2041.
The Spanish Interior Minister denies interfering in the corruption investigation Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the Spanish Minister of the Interior, has denied any political interference with an elite police investigation into the corruption scandals rocking Spain’s ruling socialists. “I was not aware of any such interference and if I had been, I would not have tolerated it,” he said.
UK gene editing rules hit by court ruling – London’s post-Brexit biotech regime has are brought under new scrutiny after a UK court ruled that ministers failed to properly scrutinize labeling requirements for genetically modified food. The UK’s Precision Breeding Act could face further pressure from Brussels if gene editing rules are folded into a future EU-UK food deal.
