The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is considering the possible deployment of reinforcements in Slovakia, Foreign Affairs Minister Ivan Korcok confirmed following a session of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee on Thursday. The minister stressed that no decision had yet been made.
"This is not a requirement from Slovakia, it's part of normal defence planning in response to the situation," said the minister. NATO is set to address the issue in the coming days and weeks. As Korcok added, such military structures are in the Baltics and Poland as a response to what happened in 2014. “Since we thought that there would be no such escalation as in 2014, the presence of NATO structures did not expand further," he said. Korcok informed the four MPs present about what is happening in Ukraine and on its border, and about the ongoing diplomatic talks. "My conclusion was that the situation is really tense, but solvable. However, there must definitely be steps to de-escalation, we must get off the table the real threat that military action against Ukraine may be carried out here, this is unacceptable," he said. The minister also called on the opposition to state clearly where it stands in a potential conflict.
A proposal to strengthen the joint action of NATO member forces on the Alliance's eastern border is just one of the possible alternatives, the Defence Ministry Martina Koval Kakascikova said on Thursday. As she added, no decision has been made to deploy foreign troops and relevant Slovak constitutional authorities will decide on any presence of foreign armed forces in Slovakia. According to the ministry, the proposal to strengthen NATO's activities on the Alliance's eastern border is based on the experience gained by NATO in the Baltic countries and Poland in response to the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and the armed conflict in Donbas and Luhansk in Ukraine.
The situation on the Ukrainian-Russian border was also a topic of the bilateral meeting between Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger and his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte. At their joint press conference in Bratislava on Thursday, Rutte underlined the need to send a signal of unity to Moscow. The Slovak Prime minister expressed his hope that an agreement would be achieved and that none of possible scenarios would materialize. Heger added that the aim of the talks is de-escalation and if economic costs are discussed, it is in the hope that more negative scenarios are averted. As for the NATO troops, Rutte noted that they are stationed in several countries as part of the forward presence, but discussing their arrival in the context of current events does not really aid the overall de-escalation strategy.
Source: TASR
