Brandstätter: “Talking alone is not enough. The federal government must finally act to ensure that Austria is safe again.”
Vienna (OTS) – “The Austrian federal government must finally wake up. Schallenberg’s whitewashing of Russia and the federal government’s actions against Russia will not get us anywhere, it won’t make Austria any safer,” says NEOS foreign policy spokesman and EU leading candidate Helmut Brandstätter after today’s ORF broadcast.Press conference.
“It is simply not true when the Foreign Minister claims that Austria is taking decisive action against Putin’s regime,” said Brandstätter. “The opposite is the case. More than two years have now passed since the attack on Ukraine – and we still have no new security strategy, we are still just as dependent on Russian gas as we were before the war, we are still a veritable paradise for Russian spies. The federal government talks a lot, but does far too little and is therefore causing a serious security risk. A warmonger like Putin cannot be stopped with empty announcements.”
NEOS are therefore once again calling for the immediate legal phase-out of Russian gas and that the number of Russian diplomats in Austria be reduced to the absolute minimum necessary, after all, around a third of the embassy staff are suspected of actually being spies. “The head of the Russian Cultural Institute is spreading propaganda instead of culture and must be expelled.”
And it is completely clear that Austria can no longer rest on its neutrality, Brandstätter continues. “Neutrality alone does not protect us. We must openly discuss how we can build a common European security and defense policy in order to be truly defensible and to be able to live safely and in peace and freedom again in Austria and Europe in the future. The ÖVP’s refusal to discuss brings us no closer to this goal than does its stubborn adherence to the unanimity principle and the Schengen veto. This is irresponsible.”
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