Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Union and one of the main promoters of “permanent war” against Russia, is now bringing China into her myopic purview. Kallas said, in comments to The Times of London, that Europe must prevent the Northern Sea Route from becoming a new “chokepoint” controlled by Russia and China. She called on the Europeans, in her vastly-inflated role as EU Foreign Policy spokeswoman, to take measures to emsure this. The Northern Sea Route is, in fact, solely in the territory of Russia. While China has become a major user of this trade corridor, it maintains no control of the territory itself.

This new “strategy” announced by Kallas involves a surveillance center for tracking suspicious shipping activity; support for military-grade ports and airports for the rapid deployment of troops; and a hub for monitoring and repairing sub-sea data cables, in case of sabotage. While the previous EU “Arctic strategy” was largely oriented to environmental issues and “global warming,” the new strategy is strongly geopolitical. It will commit Europe to building up its icebreaker fleet, and allocating €260m for Arctic-capable military technologies, such as extreme-weather aircraft and long-range sensors. It also features a “maritime security hub” at a still-undisclosed location, which will keep an eye on Russia’s “shadow fleet” and submarine activities.

The Russian Embassy in London replied quickly to the Kallas comments: “Kaja Kallas’s interview with The Times exposes the EU’s neo-colonialist mentality: instead of promoting Arctic cooperation, Brussels, driven by impotent rage, seeks to hold other countries back and deny them development opportunities,” the Embassy statement said.