Federica Mogherini upon arrival at the Foreign Affairs Council

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Good morning.

Let me start by expressing my solidarity – I believe on behalf of the entire Council - to our friends in Japan and in the Republic of Korea over the launch of missiles from DPRK. This shows once again that security threats that the world is facing are serious and that it is required that the European Union is a serious reliable security provider, obviously in our region with our neighbours but also in faraway places. 

This is why we will have on the table today as the main issue for the Foreign Affairs Council, together with Foreign and Defence ministers, a package of proposals on how to move forward to make the European Union more credible, more reliable and stronger also in the field of security and defence. 

I would like to underline the fact that our approach to defence and security is always an integrated approach together with our other instruments, first of all diplomacy, but also development and humanitarian aid. The European Union always takes a soft approach to hard security, but we also have some hard power that we are strengthening. 

And with the ministers today, I will present a progress report on all the different fields that were decided last December by the European Council from working together on developing military capabilities, including some incentives - from the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) to other means, the use of the Battlegroups. In all these issues, I will put forward proposals that the ministers will discuss and we will bring forward in the coming months in view of the European Council in June.  

But today I will also propose to the ministers that we take immediate decisions on the establishment of the military planning and conduct capability that will allow us to have more unified, more rational, more efficient approach to the existing military training missions we have and I think this is going to be a major step forward. It is not the European army – I know this is the label that is going around - but it is a more effective way of handling our military work and this is one of the steps we are going to take in the coming months.

We will also have important points on the agenda today, especially on the Western Balkans. I just came back from the visit to whole region and I will report to the ministers and later during the week to the Prime Ministers about the situation that is tense, is exposed to challenges both internally and regionally, also globally. But it is a region that has in itself the capacity, the strength to react to that, to hold, provided that the credibility of the European integration process is there. And this is our part of the work. So I expect from today, but also from the European Council later this week to express a strong and clear commitment to the Western Balkans, in terms of a credible European integration perspective.

We will also host the Egyptian Foreign Minister [Sameh Hassan Shoukry] for a working lunch. We will discuss with him bilateral relations but probably more than anything else our common regional work on some of the files that are priority for both us and Egypt, namely the situation in Libya, the Middle East Peace Process, the situation in Syria and some other regional challenges, but also bilateral cooperation on counter-terrorism, on democracy and rule of law, on economic and social development, on migration and other things.

We will have other points on the agenda, but I will meet you very shortly at the end of the morning session with the defence ministers and then again in the afternoon. I apologise this time, I will have to run because we are running a bit late, but we have a very, very busy agenda to do. I will meet you in a couple of hours from now.