Portugal will contribute to the NATO plan… but how much is still unclear
Portugal is negotiating its participation in NATO’s €40 billion plan for Ukraine, the government announced today, revealing that the Portuguese contribution will count towards the target of 2% of GDP invested in defence.
“There’s still no idea (of how much Portugal will contribute) because the numbers and methods haven’t been finalised yet, that’s under negotiation. There are working groups at the moment mandated to do this,” said Portugal’s minister of foreign affairs, Paulo Rangel.
Speaking to Portuguese journalists in Prague at the end of a two-day meeting of the ministers of foreign affairs of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the head of Portuguese diplomacy said that “one thing is certain”.
“The money spent by each state on this programme […] will also count towards NATO obligations, that is, towards the target of 2%” of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the threshold stipulated as the target for defence spending by each Allied country, Paulo Rangel explained.
At a time when the total amount and details of the Atlantic Alliance’s financial assistance programme for Ukraine to defend itself and recover from the Russian invasion are being discussed, it is estimated that the total sum could amount to €40 billion per year for a period of five years.
“A figure has not yet been completely finalised, although this figure (…) is the most likely and, in the context of the military spending of all the NATO countries and NATO itself, it is nevertheless a small amount,” said Rangel.
This topic was discussed at the informal meeting of the heads of diplomacy of the Atlantic Alliance, which ends today in the Czech city of Prague.
“This plan was discussed because just as we (Portugal) made a bilateral agreement for 10 years, following on from what had already been announced at the Vilnius Summit, the agreement between the NATO partners on this matter must also have a time horizon, which is not a war horizon, it’s a post-war horizon and that will make it possible to include these bilateral agreements,” said the Portuguese minister.
This meeting in Prague served to prepare for the main discussion on this and other issues that will take place at the Atlantic Alliance summit in Washington in July, which will be dominated by the Allies’ support for Ukraine, a country “that will certainly one day be a member of NATO”, said Paulo Rangel.
Also to be discussed at the July summit will be the succession to the leadership of NATO, where Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is seen as one of the main candidates, although he is opposed by Hungary and Romania, with Bucharest having its own candidate, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.
“Mark Rutte has the right profile to be secretary-general of NATO. He has all the necessary skills to do it and to do it as well as (Jens) Stoltenberg did and come in at a particularly difficult time,’ Paulo Rangel told the Portuguese press.
Source: LUSA
