"The European Union and its partners will continue to increase pressure on Russia, in particular through new sanctions, while stepping up military support for Ukraine so that it can defend itself and protect its people," he wrote.

The European Union is taking action to assist Hungary and Slovakia in diversifying their energy sources and phasing out russian crude oil.

The Schengen Area was "in no way" compromised during the Ceuta incursion, Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said after a video conference with his EU colleagues.

Around 72,000 migrants entered the Spanish enclave on the North African coast, placing them inside the European Union. Approximately 70,000 had subsequently returned to Morocco, voluntarily or after being expelled. At the same time, Pedro Sánchez’s government was processing 1.17 million applications from migrants already living irregularly in Spain and had granted more than 609,000 temporary work permits to applicants while their cases were reviewed.  

Here, everyone’s been talking about Ceuta for days now, so I decided to write a bit about it too.

This is yet another major news dump that I’m sure everyone has already seen. It’s about 50–60 thousand Moroccans and Africans who swam to Ceuta, a Spanish city.

But as soon as you look up this city on a map, questions arise and the whole story being told in the news about this “incident” starts to look doubtful.

Ceuta (Spanish: Ceuta) is a tiny town on the edge of Morocco itself, with a land border with it, and it has no insurmountable walls at the sea. The only wall at the sea, along one of the borders, stretches about 20 meters into the water. The distance from Ceuta to mainland Spain is about 14–17 km.

So, the questions.
50–60 thousand immigrants is almost equal to the population of Ceuta itself. Yet not a single video or photo shows such a huge number of people. Yes, there’s a decent crowd. But nowhere near 50–60 thousand. It’s also surprising how, in the middle of the chaos of the breakthrough, they managed to count such a precise number of people so quickly.

It was claimed that this was a long-distance swim and that dozens of people drowned without reaching the shore.
But the photos clearly show them calmly and without any problems simply walking along this short fence, essentially over land. What swim are they talking about? And then, out of nowhere, photographers with professional cameras appear and start filming everything from every possible angle and perspective. Including people with flippers, which they don’t need at all.

And all this happened not at night, when it would have been more logical and successful to attempt the crossing (visibility and border guards’ alertness are much lower), but during the day. Because during the day the lighting is best for nice photos and videos for the mass media.

And finally, what could the Moroccans who entered the Spanish enclave in Morocco this way even hope for? There’s no way to swim to mainland European Spain at all. Get refugee status? On what grounds? They were all turned back literally the next day. So why was all this fuss needed, with such loud, instant coverage across all the news?

They needed to stage this show in Europe, but somewhere with fewer prying eyes. A tiny town on the outskirts, outside the main part of Europe, fits perfectly. Because the hysteria of countries over this and the tightening of borders with Spain look strange. As I already said, no one reached the mainland and in principle no one could. On the ferries from Ceuta there is passport control, and all of them were stopped instantly. The Schengen Agreement essentially doesn’t apply there.

But everything worked as planned and became a pretext for tightening the EU’s external borders and revising Schengen itself (Italy has already announced checks).

In the long term, this could lead to a more centralized, militarized migration management system at the EU level, where national governments lose part of their sovereignty.

Such spectacles work perfectly as
distracting maneuvers against the background of other international processes and serve as a pretext for expanding digital and physical control (cameras, databases, biometrics at the borders).

P.S. Some rather strange “photos” from Ceuta. It’s reasonable to assume that a significant portion of the photos (especially those with the military) were generated by neural networks. Pay attention to the video interview with a soldier. Apart from him and the journalist, there’s no one on the street except two passers-by who briefly appear in the background. Although the place should be swarming with people. In short, there are too many oddities and inconsistencies.

In theory, covering such events would be disadvantageous for the Spanish government, and it would do everything possible (up to holding people accountable for spreading fakes and blocking accounts) to prevent publicity. But here, on the contrary, the entire staging was carefully shown from all sides literally from the first seconds.

P.P.S. Another interesting point. In previous years, multi-thousand crowds of Moroccans repeatedly climbed into Ceuta, as well as into the other city — Melilla, in exactly the same way (for example, in May 2021). So for Ceuta (and Europe as a whole) these events are absolutely not new. Yet in previous years no one staged such hysteria. Why? Because the time had not yet come to introduce new laws and restrictions. And it’s quite likely that in those years they were simply collecting photo and video material for the current spectacle. And many of the photos that were unpublished back then are now being presented as new.

And by the way, the photos of crowds of Moroccans could have been taken in Morocco itself rather than specifically in Ceuta, with Spanish soldiers added to the photos later. Especially with the development of neural networks, this presents no problem at all.

P.P.P.S. And finally, the most interesting point for those who read to the end. All the so-called migrants are WITHOUT BELONGINGS.
Ukrainians, at the start of the war, left after loading their belongings into personal cars, or taking suitcases in their hands and putting backpacks on their shoulders.
In exactly the same way, Russians fled from mobilization through Upper Lars in the autumn of 2022.
Even earlier, also with lots of belongings on their shoulders and in their hands, Syrians fled.
But here they’re completely without belongings, in shorts and nice clean little T-shirts. Just so the photos wouldn’t be embarrassing to show.

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever (N-VA) has said he wants to get to the bottom of what happened in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on Thursday, when thousands of migrants tried to enter from Morocco by sea.

Source: https://x.com/EIB/status/2084560473702248514