NATO Secretary General - Doorstep statement at Defence Ministers Meeting, 15 JUN 2023

Doorstep statement by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the meetings of NATO Defence Ministers at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, 15 June 2023. 🗣 | NATO Secretary General: Okay, good morning, NATO Defence Ministers will meet today and tomorrow and they meet at a critical time. Ukraine has launched a counter offensive. What we see is fierce fighting. It is still early days. But we also see that the Ukrainians are making gains and that Ukraine is able to liberate occupied land. This is due to the courage, the bravery, the skills of the Ukrainian soldiers. But it also highlights and demonstrates that the support NATO Allies have been giving to Ukraine now for many, many months, actually makes a difference on the battlefield as we speak. So one of the main issues so we will address is how to sustain and step up support to Ukraine. That will be done in the meeting of the NATO Ukraine Commission, together with Minister Reznikov. And that will be a meeting that will be preceded by meeting of the US lead Contact Group for Ukraine, that will meet earlier today. And the war in Ukraine just demonstrates the need to stand with Ukraine and then to continue to provide support. We will also address how to further strengthen NATO's deterrence and defence as preparations for upcoming Vilnius summit in July next month, where we will have new regional plans, a New Force Model, new force structure, and also address the need to strengthen our pledge to invest more in defence. We expect that the leaders at the Summit will agree that 2% of GDP for defence is not something we should strive towards, not a ceiling, but a minimum needed to be invested in our shared security. Then we will also address how to further ramp up production. Because since last fall, it has been obvious that this is now a war of attrition. And a war of attrition is a battle of logistics. And therefore we have engaged with the defence industry. And we will have an event here, an informal event where we will meet a small group of defence industry across the Alliance. And this is part of our ongoing engagement with the defence industry. We will also agree at the meeting new capability targets for battle decisive ammunition and those targets for each and every nation will be significantly higher than the current ones. Because we have seen that to provide support to Ukraine [inaudible] depleted the stocks, and therefore we need to increase the targets, produce more. Partly to replenish our stocks and partly to be able to continue to provide support. So the new capability targets for battle decisive ammunition is one important step in ensuring that Allies have the sufficient ammunition. We also in NATO have several ongoing projects of joint procurement. This is something we have done for decades, tried and tested the structures. Many of them are facilitated by the NATO Support and Procurement Agency, NSPA. And just for 155 ammunition we have ongoing projects are facilitated by the NATO Support and Procurement Agency of 1 billion US dollars. And then we have other projects for other types of ammunition and also air defence ammunition. I expect that ministers also will agree to establish a new center for the protection of critical undersea infrastructure. This center will be at our Maritime Command, MARCOM, in the United Kingdom. And then tomorrow we will also meet in the NATO Nuclear Planning Group to address how to continue to ensure that our nuclear deterrence remains safe, secure and effective and in a more dangerous world. With that, I'm ready to take your questions.