Bucharest will host a NATO meeting

Next week, Bucharest will for the first time host a meeting of the foreign ministers from the NATO member countries.

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Roxana Vasile, 23.11.2022, 13:50

A meeting of the foreign ministers from the NATO member states will take place for the first time in Bucharest next week. Also for the first time, the meeting will be joined by the Moldovan foreign minister, and the foreign ministers from Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ukraine will also attend the meeting in Bucharest. High on the agenda of the meeting will be the situation in Ukraine, says the spokeswoman for NATO, the Romanian Oana Lungescu.

According to her, the NATO foreign ministers will hold a meeting in Bucharest almost nine months after Ukraine was illegally invaded by Russia. Therefore, the situation in Ukraine, as well as the global situation in the Black Sea area, the concerns we have related to the security of the entire Euro-Atlantic region will be the priorities of the agenda of the meeting in Bucharest, said Oana Lungescu.

In his turn, the NATO Deputy Secretary General, Mircea Geoană, states that next weeks meeting of the foreign ministers of the NATO member countries, in Bucharest, is a bridge between last summers summit, in Madrid, and the next one, in Vilnius. He also mentions that the meeting is Romanias contribution to the Alliances strategic thinking and to NATOs response to the current, very complex situation on the continent.

Mircea Geoană: ʺThere are almost 50 nations that contribute indirectly to NATO, but in a process led by the United States, in the contact group for Ukraine. We continue to see the active wish of allies and partners to help Ukraine from a military point of view. At the same time, we must say that from a political point of view, this time, we do not see conditions for a negotiation between the two sides in the near future, for an obvious reason. The positions are so different and so massively far from each other that, today, we do not see the conditions for the two sides finding common ground for starting negotiations”.

Moreover, at political level, NATO does not have contacts with Russia. In addition, no one within the Alliance is negotiating anything on behalf of Ukraine – the NATO Deputy Secretary General, Mircea Geoană, also said. According to some NATO officials, on the first day of the meeting in the capital of Romania, on November 29, a session dedicated to the war between Russia and Ukraine will be organized, followed by an informal dinner to which the Ukrainian Foreign Minister was invited, who is expected to provide details on the situation in his country.

On November 30, a discussion of the allied ministers with the representatives of Finland and Sweden is scheduled. There will also be a session dedicated to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova, an opportunity for the NATO countries to make additional commitments to these partners, in the form of adapted aid packages. (LS)