The people who jeered U.S. Vice President JD Vance at the Winter Olympics were displaying “European pride” following a string of critical comments about Europe from American officials, top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas said Monday.

Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, were greeted with a smattering of boos and jeers at the San Siro stadium in Milan last week when they briefly appeared on a giant screen waving U.S. flags during the opening ceremony.

Asked about the booing on Euronews’ Europe Today show, the bloc’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said: “Well, I guess we have heard a lot of not-so-nice words from the United States regarding Europe.”

“Of course, our public also has a pride, a European pride. So it shows,” she added.

The remarks capture the tense state of EU-U.S. relations ahead of this week’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) at which European leaders are set to rub shoulders with members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

At last year’s MSC, Vance shocked many Europeans with critical comments about the EU, which he accused of stifling free speech and risking civilizational erasure due to migration.

Vance and other Trump administration officials have followed up with other disparaging comments, with the vice president recently accusing Europeans of double standards in how they deal with U.S. representatives.

“The Europeans, they’re so friendly in private and they’re willing to make a lot of accommodations and then publicly they attack us and they say, ‘We’re not going to work with the Americans. We’re not going to do anything with the Americans,’” Vance told talk show host Megyn Kelly in an interview published Saturday. “I’m sorry. It’s all bogus.”

Those comments came on the heels of Trump threatening to seize Greenland, a self-ruling 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 U.S. delegation at the conference, MSC Chair Wolfgang Ischinger told reporters in Berlin on Monday.