More than 40 heads of state and government will gather at the NATO summit in Madrid on Wednesday to discuss the future of NATO, with the conflict in Ukraine at the center of the summit.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday that NATO countries, which have already provided billions of dollars in aid to Kyiv, will agree in Madrid “a full program of assistance to Ukraine to help it exercise its right to legitimate self-defence.”
“It is very important that we are ready to continue to provide support, because today Ukraine is facing brutality not seen in Europe since the Second World War,” he stressed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been invited to join the discussions and will deliver two video interviews, while Kyiv continues to ask its partners to provide him with weapons.
French President Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed the same stance, calling on NATO to send a “message of unity and strength” at the end of the G7 summit in Germany organized ahead of the NATO summit.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for his part, on Wednesday will call on all NATO countries to increase their military spending in order to “reconfigure deterrence and secure defense over the next decade,” according to the British prime minister.
In addition to Ukraine, Wednesday’s meetings will allow NATO to adopt its new “strategic concept”, which represents the first revision of the road map adopted since 2010, and should for the first time address the problems emanating from China.
It will also be an opportunity to start the accession process for Finland and Sweden, which have decided to join NATO in response to the Russian special military operation in Ukraine and thus departed from their traditional neutrality.
But after long meetings on the sidelines of the summit, Turkey gave the green light to the entry of these two countries into the alliance. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was “fully cooperating” in the fight against the PKK.
Jens Stoltenberg said that “the alliance’s open door policy has led to a historic success.” “The admission of Finland and Sweden into the alliance will make them safer, the alliance stronger, and the Euro-Atlantic region safer,” he added.
However, the official accession of the two countries, which must be ratified by the parliaments of the 30 member states of the alliance, is a long process that takes months.
Source: AFP.