This afternoon I will be chairing here in New York the informal meeting of EU Foreign Affairs Ministers. This week here is the United Nations General Assembly. It is the most important week at the United Nations.
It is a real festival of diplomacy – almost everybody is here. Last year we were discussing about Afghanistan, and this week Ukraine will be the most important issue. Because the war in Ukraine is not just a war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are fighting, they are being bombed with missiles; and the rest of the world is being affected by the prices increase on energy, on food, by growing insecurity and high interest rates.
We can say that this is a perfect storm, where the high prices on energy and food induced by the war have created a looming financial crisis. Everyone is being affected. And we, Europeans, have to engage more with the rest of the world.
We will discuss about these issues. We will see how to counter the Russian narrative that tries to convince people around the world that this problem is being caused by our sanctions, when in fact this is a consequence of the war itself.
There are many other issues on the agenda. We have a lot of crisis erupting around us. We have had crises recently in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan, [and] also in Central Asia. We will discuss about it, but we will be mainly focusing on the global consequences of the war in Ukraine, that are spreading around the world and created a very unstable and dangerous situation.
Link to the video: https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-230225