"It's a fundamental question and one on which I hope we can reach a conclusion as early as next year, by being very reactive and very quick," Sébastien Lecornu said in an interview with the France 2 television channel. The minister insisted that this rapid reaction force, "to secure European citizens, Portuguese, Italian, German and French", must be able to be created "very quickly". According to Lecornu, the objective of this still-draft project is to "put forces in a position to contribute" to "being reactive in the event of a crisis", and he added that there would be no loss of sovereignty for the countries involved, which would maintain control over their military devices. Sébastien Lecornu justified this project with the fact that there are "many crises in which NATO has no competence to act and in which France often carries out operations alone". The minister gave as an example the evacuation of European citizens in crisis-hit countries, as happened in Sudan in April 2023, when Paris mobilised military planes and ships to evacuate more than a thousand foreigners of more than 80 different nationalities, including just over 200 French citizens. Lecornu considered that operations such as this one (called Sagittaire) in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, with many countries involved, it should be natural to share the burden, which "has a price and a value", among European countries. "We have missions that are militarised, but which NATO does not need to know about for a number of reasons, and about which we now say 'we're going to do it in Europe', and that, for us, is pragmatism," the minister said. This "rapid reaction European force" was one of the initiatives launched on Thursday by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, in a long speech at Sorbonne University in Paris, in which he defended the relaunch of the European Union (EU), in the context of the elections for the European Parliament in June. In his speech, the French President presented his vision for Europe, focused mainly on defence and economic and trade policies, after taking stock of the EU since 2017. Macron stated that Europeans cannot rely solely on the support of the United States for their defence, because for Washington "it is not the priority" and, without going so far as to call for the creation of a European army, he called for "strategic intimacy" in the military domain between the EU Member States. The French President explained that it is necessary to "increase defence spending", suggesting a European loan to finance the defence effort, in addition to applying "European preference in the purchase of military equipment", as well as accelerating the integration of the armies in the face of threats such as Russia, with which there has been an increase in tensions in recent weeks due to France's support for Ukraine. All this is based on the idea that Europe is "mortal" and that "it can die" or be "relegated", as the French Head of State stressed in the same speech. Read Also: 25th of April. Marcelo thanks Macron and Biden for "warm messages" (Portuguese version)