Top Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev taunted the European Union (EU) and Canada over the push to secure Greenland from its NATO ally Denmark for the U.S. by President Donald Trump’s White House.

Dmitriev is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and has conducted negotiations with the U.S. on ending Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

He was reacting to the latest comments by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, to CNN. Miller said nobody would fight the U.S. over Greenland, a Danish territory in the Arctic, and questioned Copenhagen’s claim to it.

“Greenland seems decided—the EU will continue doing what vassals do best: ‘monitoring the situation’ and exemplifying double standards,” Dmitriev wrote on X. “Canada next?”

Trump has previously floated the idea of NATO’s Canada becoming the 51st state of the U.S.

Newsweek has contacted the EU’s diplomatic service for comment. Newsweek has also contacted the Canadian foreign ministry for comment outside of normal business hours.

A divided NATO is in Russia’s interests. The Kremlin has sought to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its NATO allies since Trump took office and began trying to broker an end to the Ukraine war, seeing in him a leader sympathetic to their position.

But most non-U.S. NATO allies want Trump to take a much harder position on Russia over Ukraine and fear he will force Kyiv into a compromise that rewards Moscow’s aggression and damages broader European security.

Talk of the seizure of Greenland by the U.S. has escalated in the wake of the stunning military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who is facing trial in New York for narcoterrorism charges.

Trump has also touted action against Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico in recent days.

The Trump administration is reviving the Monroe Doctrine, which views the Western Hemisphere as an exclusively American sphere of influence. Its renewal has been dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”.

European nations have rallied to Denmark’s side over the Greenland dispute.

The U.S. says it needs control of Greenland, the world’s largest island, which sits to the northeast of Canada, for its own national security, citing Russian and Chinese activity in the Arctic.

Trump had earlier said the EU knows the U.S. needs to control Greenland for the security of the Arctic region.

Greenland, which hosts a U.S. military base, also has large deposits of highly-prized critical minerals that are essential to advanced manufacturing.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen pushed back forcefully against Trump’s renewed talk of taking control of Greenland, telling him to “stop the threats” and rejecting any suggestion that the U.S. has a claim to the territory.

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Frederiksen said it made “absolutely no sense” to argue that the U.S. needs to take over Greenland, stressing that Washington has “no right to annex any of the three nations in the Danish kingdom.”

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