Secretary Kerry: 'We need to make Europe less dependent on Russia for energy'

"This crisis in Ukraine is a wake-up call for us to accelerate the work we’ve been doing to promote a stronger, more prosperous transatlantic community," US Secretary of State John Kerry said on April 29. “Our entire model of global leadership is at stake.”

“If we want a Europe that is both whole and free, then we have to do more together immediately, with a sense of urgency, to ensure that European nations are not dependent on Russia for the majority of their energy,” he said in remarks at the North Atlantic Council. “In this age of new energy markets, in this age of concern about global climate change and carbon overload, we ought to be able to rush to the ability to be able to make Europe less dependent. And if we do that, that will be one of the greatest single strategic differences that could be made here.”

“We have to invest in the underpinnings of our economic partnership," he continued. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership “will do more to change the way we do business and some of our strategic considerations than any other single economic step that we can take, with the sole exception of the energy independence.”

He also argued that “we cannot continue to allow allied defence budgets to shrink”.

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