People who booed US Vice President JD Vance at the Winter Olympics were showing "European pride" after a series of critical comments about Europe by US officials, the EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said on Monday, Politico reports.
Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, were greeted with boos at the San Siro stadium in Milan last week when they briefly appeared on a giant screen waving American flags during the opening ceremony.
Asked about the whistleblowing on Euronews' Europe Today show, the bloc's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said: "Well, I think we've heard a lot of not-so-good words from the United States about Europe."
"Of course, our audience also has a pride, a European pride. That's what it looks like," she added, reports the Telegraph.
The remarks capture the tense state of EU-US relations ahead of this week's Munich Security Conference (MSC), at which European leaders will meet with members of US President Donald Trump's administration.
At last year's MSC, Vance shocked many Europeans with critical comments about the EU, which he accused of suppressing free speech and risking the extinction of civilization due to migration.
Vance and other Trump administration officials have continued with other disparaging comments, with the vice president recently accusing Europeans of double standards in how they deal with US representatives.
"The Europeans, they're very friendly privately and they're willing to make a lot of accommodations and then publicly they attack us and say, 'We're not going to work with the Americans. We're not going to do anything with the Americans. I'm sorry. It's all fake,'" Vance told talk show host Megyn Kelly in an interview published Saturday.
These comments came shortly after Trump's threat to invade Greenland, a self-governing Danish territory in the Arctic.
Despite being invited, Vance does not plan to join this year's edition of the MSC, according to reports from Bloomberg and Fox News.
Instead, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the US delegation to the conference, MSC Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger told reporters in Berlin on Monday. /Telegraph
