Spain will contribute to the new NATO defense plan by sending new troops to the eastern flank, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced this afternoon upon arrival at the summit that the allies are holding today and tomorrow in Vilnius. Spain will announce today "its commitment to deploy and reinforce our presence on the eastern front, first in Romania and by sending new troops to Slovakia", Sánchez told the international press. The new allied defense plan that will be approved today in Vilnius, the first reform of regional defense plans since the Cold War, will have "a 360-degree vision", in accordance with the Strategic Concept agreed at the Madrid summit last year , has remembered.
The Ministry of Defense has not yet specified what the Spanish contribution to NATO's deterrence and defense activities in Slovakia will consist of, where there is already one of the combat battalions created to deal with the Russian threat as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. On the other hand, the Spanish army has been participating since 2021 in the Alliance operation in Romania with troops from the Air and Space Army with a team of 130 people who carry out aerial police work, a staff that will be reinforced, in line with the decisions that the allied leaders take today and tomorrow in the Lithuanian capital.
The summit began this afternoon, hours after the Alliance's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, mediated between Turkey and Sweden to reach a compromise so that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sends ratification of the protocol "as soon as possible" to the national parliament of access to the Nordic country. Erdogan wrested last-minute concessions from Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson on anti-terrorism as the Alliance agreed to Turkey's old demand to appoint an anti-terrorism coordinator within the military organization. The allied leaders are currently negotiating the language of the declaration with which they will respond to Ukraine's request for entry and its relationship with the security guarantees that, at the bilateral level, the United States and other allies are negotiating with Kyiv.
