Poland, in particular, led the way in defense expenditure in 2023, using nearly 4 percent of its GDP on an arms spending spree, according to the alliance's annual report.
With the Hungarian vote, all NATO members have supported Sweden's bid, clearing the way for Stockholm to join the alliance.
As Sweden moves ever closer to joining NATO, both it and the alliance are reserving judgment on who or what caused damage to a telecommunications cable that runs between Sweden and Estonia, until an investigation concludes.
In a social media post today, Shapps said he was “looking forward to working with the brave men and women of our Armed Forces” and “continuing the UK’s support for Ukraine in their fight against Putin’s barbaric invasion.”
While the agreement comes with a number of gifts to Ukraine, including the promise to waive standard requirements for NATO membership in the future, it falls well short of the goal set by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that NATO members lay out a clear path forward for his country to join the alliance.
While far from the official last step for Sweden’s NATO membership, the transmission of Sweden’s Accession Protocol to the Turkish Grand National Assembly all but removes any doubt that the northern European nation will become the alliance’s 32nd member.
"I am confident that we'll find a united way to address the specific issue on [Ukraine] membership, but I will not go into the details of exact language now because that is something we will announce [at the Summit],” said Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General.
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO secretary general, said after a meeting today that “unsolved issues” remain, all but ending the prospect of NATO expanding to 32 members at the alliance’s Heads of State Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week.
It is the third time the former Norwegian prime minister has had his mandate extended since taking on the secretary general position in 2014.
The signed agreement may be bittersweet for Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin, who championed the NATO membership but on Sunday saw her party defeated in a general election that will cost her the prime minister’s chair.
Despite the concerning finding, between 2021 and 2022, defense spending across the alliance increased by 2.2 percent in real terms, surpassing an estimated $1 trillion.
The military’s top generals have called Russia the number one threat. The incoming administration doesn’t seem convinced that Russia is a threat at all, with Trump himself speaking warmly of Vladimir Putin and dimly of NATO allies. But whatever Putin’s intentions for the future, Russia has proved what its capabilities are in Estonia in 2007, […]
NATO HQ: As Central Command continues to hammer Daesh with bombs, rockets, bullets, and more, that’s straining the limited supply of AWACS, the airborne radar/command post aircraft that form the backbone of a modern air campaign. “That’s a capability under stress,” a senior NATO diplomat told reporters here. AWACS is one of those classic “high-demand, low-density” […]
NATO HQ: It’s taken a while, but NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced here that the 28-member alliance has agreed to declare cyber an operational domain, much as the sea, air and land are. The really important result of this is that, for the first time, a cyber attack could trigger Article 5, the core NATO […]
NATO HQ: If there’s one undercurrent to all the discussions here and on Ash Carter‘s flight from Washington about NATO, it is that the US is — once again — calling on Europe to do more to defend itself. With the current imbalance of spending at stark levels — America provides 75 percent of NATO […]