The NATO foreign ministers begin this Tuesday the first of two days of meeting, in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, in which they must agree on ways to increase support for Ukraine and analyze “the challenges posed by China.”
This meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s main political decision-making body, which will bring together the foreign ministers in the Palace of Parliament, will be attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba, to discuss the issues most urgent needs of the country and the long-term support of NATO.
At the center of the meeting’s agenda -in which the head of Portuguese diplomacy, João Gomes Cravinho, will participate- will be the conflict in Ukraine, at a time when the Russian Federation has taken advantage of the arrival of winter to increase its offensive.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has already announced that the Alliance “will not back down” and promised support to the Ukrainian authorities for “as long as it takes”, acknowledging a “horrible beginning of winter” in that country.
Stoltenberg hopes that foreign ministers will agree to increase “non-lethal” support.
As for China, the NATO Secretary General stressed that this power “is not an adversary” but “is intensifying military modernization, increasing its presence, from the Arctic to the Western Balkans, from space to cyberspace, and seeking control the critical infrastructure of NATO allies”.
Stoltenberg warned that the war in Ukraine has demonstrated “the dangerous dependence” on Russian gas and wants the allies to assess their dependence “on other authoritarian regimes, mainly China.”
Also invited to participate in the work were the Foreign Ministers of Finland and Sweden, two countries that in May of this year presented a joint proposal to join NATO, abandoning decades of military non-alignment, but whose process is not yet complete. , without the ratification of Turkey and Hungary.
Also present will be the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and Moldova and the Secretary of State of the United States of America, Antony Blinken.
The meeting takes place in Romania, a country bordering Ukraine, where Portugal has a military presence, within NATO.
In October, 166 Portuguese soldiers (the 2nd National Detached Force) left for Romania to take part in NATO’s “Enhanced Surveillance Activities”, aimed at contributing to the Alliance’s deterrence and defense efforts on its south-eastern flank.
Source: TSF
