The announcement comes ahead of the summit of NATO leaders, which will be held on Thursday March 24 in Brussels, and will be marked by a videoconference intervention by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In front of the press, Wednesday March 23, Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, announced that the latter woulddeploy four new battlegroups in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, to strengthen its defenses against Russia on its eastern flank. This will bring “eight battlegroups deployed from the Baltic to the Black Sea”he detailed.
NATO has also “plans to protect all allies from attack with nuclear weaponshe added. Russia must stop this dangerous rhetoric and understand that a nuclear war should never be fought and that it can never win a nuclear war.”
“NATO supports Ukraine in its right to self-defense, but it is not a party to the conflict and does not want the conflict to become a war between NATO and Russia”, insisted Jens Stoltenberg. For this reason, “NATO will not send troops to Ukraine and will not impose a no-fly zone”. The Ukrainian president has repeatedly called for the establishment of such a zone.
“NATO allies have stepped up their support for Ukraine, including providing advanced air defense systems, anti-tank systems, different types of weapons and ammunition, and I expect allies to consider how they can step up their efforts and provide more chemical weapons protection and defense equipment”said Jens Stoltenberg.
He finally denounced “China’s political support for Russia, including spreading outright lies and misinformation” and “the possibility of Beijing providing material support for the invasion of Ukraine… I expect Alliance leaders to call on China to refrain from supporting Russia’s war effort and join the rest of the world in calling for an immediate end to this war.”he added.