(AP) Austria’s minister for the European Union on Thursday accused Turkey of using migrant flows as a means to pressure the 27-member bloc for its own purposes and warned that the EU won’t be “blackmailed” by any country.
Karoline Edtstadler said countries on the EU’s external borders like Cyprus won’t be left alone to fend for themselves amid an influx of new migrants.
“Turkey, which uses migration and migrants as a tool to pressure the European Union, we will not accept that,” Edtstadler said after talks with Cypriot Foreign Minister Nikos Christodoulides. “We as a European Union won’t be blackmailed — not by Turkey, not by Belarus, not by any other country in the world.”
