Published: 8:25pm, 23 Dec 2024Updated: 8:51pm, 23 Dec 2024
Greenland is not for sale, its elected leader said on Monday, responding to comments made by US president-elect Donald Trump regarding the “ownership and control” of the vast Arctic island that has been part of Denmark for more than 600 years.
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“Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” the island’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said in a written comment.
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote on social media on Sunday.
Trump, who takes office on January 20, did not elaborate on the statement.
Trump reopened a debate from 2019, when he offered to buy what is the world’s biggest island, a proposal that was quickly rebuffed by Denmark at the time.
Greenland is already crucial to American national defence, being home to a US airbase and a radar station. The war in Ukraine has dramatically increased the territory’s military value to the US and Nato, given the island’s strategic location between the Arctic and the North Atlantic.