At a press briefing in Washington with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “NATO is advancing with a sense of urgency and a strong sense not only of unity of purpose, but unity of action.” He pointed, for example, to the recent approval by Türkiye of Sweden’s accession to NATO, which follows Finland’s accession in 2023:
“The accession of both Finland and Sweden was far from inevitable. In fact, if you go back a little over two years, no one was talking about it. But in the wake of Moscow’s renewed aggression against Ukraine, both countries felt that it was clearly in their interest to defend their people and defend their sovereignty by joining the Alliance.”
Secretary Blinken said he and NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg discussed NATO’s unwavering support for Ukraine:
“Last week NATO signed a $1.2 billion contract to produce 220,000 artillery shells. That’s going to help Allies restock their own arsenals, and it compliments efforts by the United States, by the European Union, by Ukraine, to ramp up defense production. This will make NATO itself and all Allies much more resilient for future threats as we move forward.”
In NATO’s assistance to Ukraine, there has never been a better example of burden-sharing, Secretary Blinken noted:
“The support that the United States has provided to Ukraine has been exceptional, about $75 billion over the last couple of years. But our partners and allies, notably our core NATO Allies, have provided more than $110 billion over that same period of time.”
For Ukraine to succeed and for Russia to know “strategic failure,” Secretary Blinken said, it is vital the U.S. Congress pass the supplemental budget request that President Joe Biden proposed in October, which includes an additional $61 billion for Ukraine:
“Without it, everything that Ukrainians achieved and that we’ve helped them achieve will be in jeopardy. And absent that supplemental, we’re going to be sending a strong and wrong message to all of our adversaries that we are not serious about the defense of freedom, the defense of democracy. And it will simply reinforce for Vladimir Putin that he can somehow outlast Ukraine and outlast us.”
“That is not going to be the case,” Secretary Blinken declared. “We have to make sure that it’s not the case.”
