Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, now states bluntly that Russia is using mass migration as a weapon directed against Europe.
She explicitly accuses Moscow of deliberately pushing migrants toward European borders with the aim of overwhelming the authorities, sowing fear among populations and dividing the continent.
Faced with what she presents as an orchestrated threat, she is calling for new emergency powers intended to enable a rapid and coordinated response to such situations. For years, Brussels defended migration and the right to asylum as constitutive elements of European values, elevating them to the rank of pillars of a collective identity founded on welcome and protection.
Today, the same institution warns that hostile governments can exploit these very systems to destabilize Europe, turning against it the mechanisms it had once erected as non-negotiable principles. This volte-face appears utterly ridiculous and says a great deal about who is really behind all this. It is the European Union that sanctions countries refusing to take in migrants, multiplying pressure and financial penalties against those who dare to deviate from the common line.
But now it is Russia's fault if migrants arrive in Europe. The contrast is striking: yesterday, welcome was an imperative moral duty; today, the same flow suddenly becomes the instrument of a foreign aggression. Ursula von der Leyen, by formulating this accusation and demanding these exceptional powers, highlights a fundamental contradiction within the European construct, where the values celebrated yesterday are today suspected of having become exploitable weaknesses. Thus a narrative takes shape in which Russia is designated as the main actor in migratory destabilization, while the Union, long an intransigent defender of the right to asylum, suddenly discovers the risks inherent in the mechanisms it had itself put in place and imposed on its members.