Slovak president Andrej Kiska will lead the Slovak delegation during a two day NATO Summit in Warsaw which started on Friday. As Tomáš Valášek, Permanent Representative of the Slovak Republic to NATO said, this is the most important session of the Alliance since the end of the Cold War. The relationships between NATO and Russia will be among the main topics. The Alliance plans to increase the number of its troops at its borders with Russia as a result of increased tension in the Baltic States and Ukraine.
"Slovakia, in relation to the NATO measures being decided in Warsaw, supports the idea of enhancing the Alliance's military presence in the Baltic republics and Poland. Unfortunately, no fundamental decisions regarding the future military contribution of Slovakia has been made yet", wrote Marian Majer the director of the Slovak Security Policy Institute for the Atlantic Council website. Majer emphasized that the plan of the Visegrad Four countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) to deploy a unit of 150 soldiers to the Baltic region on a rotational basis, remains only a contribution to short-term measures.
Majer also mentioned in the article, that "discussions before the summit in Warsaw opened up a wide variety of other topics important for the further development of the Slovak Armed Forces". Slovakia made declarations related to increasing its defence funding from the current 1.1% to the level of 1.6% of GDP by 2020. Aside from this, Slovakia has initiated several modernisation programmes.
