NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in The Hague today that the military alliance cares deeply about the Western Balkans and that its omission from the declaration adopted at the alliance summit does not mean a change in its stance towards the region.
Following a meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) at the NATO summit in The Hague, where leaders of the 32 members decided to significantly increase defense spending and reaffirmed a strong commitment to collective defense, Rutte said that the adopted declaration was not like traditional UN or earlier NATO statements, “with 60 pages, and the history of the world from the birth of Jesus to the present day”.
“That’s stupid, we tried to focus. We care a lot about the Western Balkans – KFOR is in Kosovo, EUFOR is in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I visited the region and had long talks with leaders in Bosnia and Kosovo. I had dinner in Brussels with the President of Serbia (Aleksandar Vučić),” said Rutte, when asked what the lack of mention of the Western Balkans in the adopted declaration meant.
At the final press conference at the two-day NATO summit, Rutte said that the alliance was very engaged in the Western Balkans, as was the EU, and that it was working closely with the head of European diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
“What we really wanted was not to repeat rhetoric like ‘Ukraine’s irreversible path to NATO’. None of that has changed, but we wanted to focus on three key issues (production, consumption and Ukraine) in five paragraphs, actually four since one is about the next meeting,” Rutte added.
