International NATO fails to reach agreement on multi-year aid for Ukraine
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has failed in his attempt to persuade the alliance states to make multi-year commitments for military aid to Ukraine. In the run-up to a summit meeting in Washington, the 32 allies were only able to agree to provide support of at least 40 billion euros within the next year, as the German Press Agency learned from several delegations.
03.07.2024, 13:16
SDA
A concrete agreement on the question of who will contribute how much was also reportedly not reached. The NATO states have only vaguely stated that the gross domestic product should play a role.
Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had originally called on the allies to guarantee Ukraine long-term military aid worth at least 40 billion euros annually. It was also a matter of showing Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would not win his war of aggression against Ukraine, he explained at a meeting with the foreign ministers of the 32 NATO states in Prague at the end of May. The amount of 40 billion euros would roughly correspond to the previous annual support of the allies since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
On the question of how a fair burden-sharing could be ensured, Stoltenberg said at the time that one option would be to calculate the contribution of the individual member states on the basis of their gross domestic product. This would mean that the USA, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy would have to pay by far the largest share of the annual 40 billion euros.
It had been Stoltenberg's wish that the 32 NATO states would agree on a common position by next week's summit in Washington. However, an agreement on a very ambitious pledge had been considered unlikely from the outset - partly because countries such as France and Italy have so far only spent a comparatively small proportion of their gross domestic product on military support for Ukraine.
