Madrid (EFE).- The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, will take a break in the general election campaign on 23J to travel to Lithuania on Tuesday in order to participate in what will be his sixth NATO summit.
A summit that will once again have as one of its main issues the situation in Ukraine after the Russian invasion marked those held last year in Brussels and Madrid.
After participating on Monday night in the face-to-face debate with the PP leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, for the July 23 elections, Sánchez will travel the following day to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, which will host the meeting of the leaders of the Atlantic Alliance.
An appointment that will cause the first halt in the electoral campaign of the President of the Government since the following week, on July 17 and 18, he will also have to travel to Brussels to participate in the European Union-CELAC summit that will bring together the heads of State or Government in Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Sánchez, who is going to Vilnius after Spain assumed the semi-annual presidency of the EU Council on July 1 after opening that period with a visit to Kiev, will reiterate at the NATO summit the need to continue supporting Ukraine without fissures and until the end of the Russian invasion.
This has been assured to Efe by government sources who stress that Ukraine’s accession to NATO is not an issue that is on the table right now to make an immediate decision.
In this regard, the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, recently pointed out that what is important now is that Ukraine recover peace and then “other issues will be discussed.”
More military aid to Ukraine is expected to be approved at the summit
Another closer adhesion will be discussed at the summit, that of Sweden, which is still pending due to the blockade of Turkey and Hungary because Ankara accuses the country of being a refuge for terrorists and Budapest is upset by the Nordic country’s criticism of the quality of their democracy.
After Finland and Sweden were invited to join the Alliance at the summit last year in Madrid, and the vetoes for the first of those countries were overcome, they remain for the second.
Spain supports this incorporation and the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has called a meeting for this Monday with the Swedish Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, and the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to try to reach a political agreement before Vilnius Summit.
Stoltenberg was ending his term as head of the Alliance, but this week it was agreed to extend it for another year, a renewal that Sánchez has described as crucial at a time like the present due to the war in Ukraine.
In Vilnius, Sánchez will reiterate Spain’s commitment to reach 2% of GDP in Defense spending by 2029, as guaranteed at the Madrid summit and despite criticism from its partners from United We Can.
According to data made public this week by Stoltenberg, Spain will allocate 1.26% of its GDP to military spending in 2023, which places it as the third NATO country that invests the least in Defense in relative terms, only behind Belgium and Luxembourg.
The Government trusts that a clear strategy will be agreed upon at the summit to deal with the instability and threats posed by the Sahel.
Sánchez will meet again with the president of the United States, Joe Biden
Sánchez will meet again at an international summit with the president of the United States, Joe Biden, with whom he met at the White House on May 12.
It is foreseeable that during the course of the meeting there will be some conversation between the two, although there is no official bilateral meeting planned.
The next NATO summit will be held in 2024 in Washington, and the July 23 elections may determine whether Sánchez will attend it again or whether it will be Alberto Núñez Feijóo who will debut at that meeting.
The one in Vilnius is the sixth summit of the Alliance attended by the President of the Government, who attended for the first time the one that was held in 2018 in Brussels.
The following year he was present at Watford (United Kingdom), and in 2020 there was no due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Brussels once again hosted that of 2021 and that of an extraordinary nature that was convened in March 2022 due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The last one so far in which Sánchez participated was the one he hosted, in Madrid, in June of last year.
Spain will directly participate in the security of the Vilnius summit, since a battery of Nasams anti-aircraft missiles, which is deployed in Latvia, will defend the skies over Lithuania during the Alliance leaders’ meeting.