‘Natural that Europe should want an army’

PARIS: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday it made sense for a powerful economic bloc like the European Union to want to defend itself militarily.

The comments came after U.S. President Donald Trump fired off a tweet as he arrived in Paris on Friday in which he described a call by French President Emmanuel Macron for a European army as “very insulting”. “Europe is a powerful economic entity, a powerful economic union and it is quite natural that it wants to be independent, self-sufficient and sovereign in matters of defense and security,” Putin told RT television. Trump had taken a dim view of comments Macron made in a Europe 1 radio interview this week in which he appeared to cast the United States as a threat.