The Diplomat
The Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, participated yesterday in Brussels in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council, in which she defended before her NATO counterparts the “necessary balance between budget, capabilities and contributions to operations”, supported investments in industry and innovation and warned of the need to strengthen cooperation between the Alliance and the EU to face the challenges to security in Europe.
During the meeting, held at NATO Headquarters in Brussels a day after the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting and the first informal session of the regular NATO Defense Ministers’ Meeting, representatives of the 30 allied states and Finland and Sweden approved the Policy Roadmap 2023, which is the first step in the four-year planning cycle (2023-2027), and addressed progress on measures adopted during the June 2022 Madrid Summit to strengthen the deterrence and defense posture.
In her speech, Robles expressed her satisfaction with the consensus reached, “which is the perfect example of unity, and the best message that can be sent to aggressors such as Russia”, and warned of the need to maintain the necessary balance between budget, capabilities and contributions to operations to achieve an alliance that is adapted, sustainable and endowed with sufficient resources to carry out its three fundamental tasks at 360 degrees.
The Minister of Defense also expressed the need to invest in industry and innovation to increase “resilience” in defense matters and drew attention to the extension of threats to critical infrastructures, especially submarines. She also insisted on the desirability of strengthening cooperation with “our unique and essential partner, the European Union” in order to meet the current security challenges in Europe and the challenges coming from the South.
In the margins of the ministerial meeting, Robles held a bilateral meeting with her Hungarian counterpart, Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, as well as a multilateral meeting with the ministers of the other countries that have deployed troops in Latvia since 2017 in the framework of the allied mission Enhanced Forward Presence.
In this regard, the minister stressed the “full commitment of Spain” to this NATO mission that is being developed throughout the Eastern Flank as a contribution to deterrence and defense and assured that our country will maintain “an important level of participation” in the mission, adapting at every moment its deployment to achieve maximum effectiveness according to the needs of the Alliance.
Echenique rejects the anti-missile battery in Estonia
Precisely, the spokesman of Unidas Podemos (minority partner in the coalition government) in Congress, Pablo Echenique, reiterated yesterday the position of his party against the “escalation of war” in Ukraine and its rejection of the decision of the Ministry of Defense to deploy an anti-missile battery Nasams in Estonia from April, similar to the one sent to Latvia in June 2022 in the framework of NATO. This deployment was agreed the day before by Robles during her bilateral meeting in Brussels with the Estonian Minister, Janno Pevkur.
In declarations to TVE, Echenique could not specify if this decision had been discussed in the Council of Ministers and, therefore, if it had the support of the members of Podemos because, he assured, he is not a minister and, therefore, does not know the deliberations of the Council. However, he regretted that at the beginning of the Russian invasion “only” “defensive weaponry” was sent to Ukraine, but in recent times it has begun to decide to send offensive material, such as “tanks and now fighter-bombers”. In his opinion, the “only” solution to the war is to bet on “the diplomatic way and peace”. “That is our position and there we also have a political difference with the PSOE,” he said.
