- European Commission president Donald Tusk lashes out at the
UK foreign secretary after he compares the EU to Soviet Russia. - Tusk calls the comparison "insulting" and a failure of respect.
- Relations between Tusk and the UK government have been strained in recent weeks with Tusk openly mocking May on social media.
- there are just weeks until the key EU summit on whether a Brexit withdrawal agreement can be reached with the UK.
LONDON - British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt's comparison between the EU and Soviet Russia was as "unwise as it is insulting," the president of the European Commission Donald Tusk has said.
Hunt compared the Soviet Union to the European Union in a speech at the Conservative party's annual conference this week, with his remarks roundly condemned by world leaders and European diplomats.
Tusk, a former Polish prime minister who was evicted from his home when Poland's rulers cracked down on political opponents in 1981, said: "The Soviet Union was about prisons and gulags, violence against citizens and neighbours," adding: "As someone who has spent half his life in the Soviet bloc I know what I'm talking about."
Asked whether Hunt should resign, Tusk said: "It's not my problem."
Hunt's remarks were also condemned by two former leaders of the Foreign Office. Peter Ricketts, who ran the Foreign Office between 2006 and 2010, tweeted: "This rubbish is unworthy of a British foreign secretary. The EU isn't a Soviet-style prison. Its legal order has brought peace and prosperity after a century of war. Our decision to leave was always going to leave us worse off. The only punishment is the self-inflicted variety."
Hunt later backtracked on the comments and said he was not directly comparing the EU with the Soviet Union.
"Any sensible reading of the speech would see that this was a passionate request and desire for friendship with our European neighbours going forward," he told a reporter on Tuesday.
"But what I was saying is if the attitude of the EU is that someone that wants to leave the club has to be punished, then that's not consistent with European ideals," he told CNBC at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.
"The EU was partly set up to stand firm against Soviet totalitarianism and I was just pointing out the contradiction that that's what we were set up to stop."
This is a developing story.
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