WORLD NEWS FOR MONTENEGRO DIASPORA
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AUTHOR:M.J. GDNUS
US President-elect Donald Trump has said that US ownership and control of Greenland is a necessity, but the European Union has no comment on that.
Although the vast majority of Greenlanders are EU citizens, the EU's diplomatic service, known as the European External Action Service (EEAS), only responded briefly to Politika's questions.
"I can give you a quick answer: we don't comment on comments," said Anouar El-Announi, the EU's spokesman for foreign policy and security.
Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, is not in the EU, but is classified as an "overseas territory associated with the EU."
Of the nearly 57,000 people who live on the mineral-rich island, only about 2,000 are not Danish, meaning the population is mostly made up of EU citizens.
Trump on Sunday expressed renewed interest in buying Greenland, after initially doing so in 2019.
He also named a new ambassador to Denmark: PayPal co-founder and former U.S. ambassador to Sweden Kenneth Howery.
“For the sake of national security and freedom around the world, the United States considers ownership and control of Greenland to be an absolute necessity,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
But not everyone was as uncertain as Brussels about the possibility of Greenland falling into American hands.
“Greenland is ours,” the territory’s prime minister, Mute Egede, said on Facebook on Monday.
Egede insisted that Greenland belongs to its people, who must not lose “the long fight for freedom.”
Officially, Copenhagen agrees with Egede’s position.
Hours after Trump made his comments, Denmark announced it would increase defense spending in Greenland to at least 1.3 billion euros.
They announced this after Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said that the timing was just an "irony of fate".
The governments of Greenland and Denmark did not immediately respond to Politika's request for comment.
