After a dinner on Wednesday 15 June, Defence Ministers from NATO countries continued, on Thursday 16 June, their meeting in Brussels.
On Wednesday evening, together with their Georgian, Swedish and Finnish counterparts, and the High Representative of the Union, the Ministers were expected to make further announcements of support for Ukraine, after being briefed on the country’s urgent needs by its Defence Minister, Oleksii Reznikov.
“The Allies are determined to continue to provide the military equipment that Ukraine needs to prevail, including heavy weapons and long-range systems”, Mr Stoltenberg told the media on Wednesday.
The US-led Ukraine Contact Group, which brings together nearly 50 countries, also met on Wednesday 15 June to discuss Ukraine’s urgent military equipment needs.
Moreover, according to Mr Stoltenberg, at the Madrid Summit at the end of June, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been invited to attend, the Allies could agree on a comprehensive assistance programme to help the country “in the long term, to move from Soviet-era equipment to modern NATO equipment and to improve interoperability with NATO”. Mr Stoltenberg said that the transition required a lot of sharing of knowledge and expertise. “And it’s also very much about interoperability, making sure that they have the standards, the routines, the command and control that also allows them to have interoperability with the other NATO allies”, he added.
According to the Secretary General, the Allies were also due to discuss ways to strengthen practical support to other partners “at risk”, including Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia, on Wednesday evening. Finland and Sweden’s application for NATO membership could also be discussed, while Turkey is blocking the process (see EUROPE 12970/19).
On Thursday, the Ministers will discuss the “need to significantly strengthen” NATO’s deterrence and defence to meet a new security reality.
“We will now take decisions on the scale and design of our posture for the longer term. To ensure that we can defend every inch of Allied territory, from the first moment, at all times, and against any threat”, explained the Secretary General.
He said that this meant “big increases in our presence, capabilities, and readiness”.
He said this would involve more forward-deployed NATO combat formations to reinforce the battlegroups on the eastern flank, more air, sea and cyber defences, pre-positioned equipment and weapons stocks, and a new force model with more high-readiness forces and specific forces pre-assigned to the defence of particular Allies. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)