U.S. Vice President JD Vance y accused Denmark and the rest of Europe of failing to protect Greenland from the intentions of Russia and China.

“I guess my advice to European leaders and anybody else would be to take the president of the United States seriously”, Vance told journalists at the White House when asked about Greenland.

He especially urged Europe to respond to Trump’s insistence that the United States needs the island for “missile defense”: “So what we"re asking our European friends to do is to take the security of that land mass more seriously, because if they’re not, the United States is going to have to do something about it”.

In a New York Times interview published Thursday [January, 8], Trump said that he wants to own Greenland instead of just exercising a long-standing treaty that gives the United States wide latitude to use Greenland for military bases.

Meanwhile, according to an Associated Press report, Denmark’s ambassador to the US, Jesper Moller Sorensen, and Jacob Isbosethsen, Greenland’s chief representative in Washington, met with White House National Security Council officials on Thursday to discuss Trump’s renewed push to take over Greenland.

AP cited Danish government officials who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. “I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you"re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document”, - Trump told the newspaper.