Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland Zbigniew Rau declared on Friday, after the plenary session of the Romania-Poland-Turkey Trilateral Meeting on security issues, that the regular meetings among the three countries give a unique perspective on NATO's role in these "turbulent times", when there are "traditional and new threats" affecting the transatlantic community.
Regular meetings among our countries give a unique perspective on NATO's role in these turbulent times, when we face traditional and new threats affecting our transatlantic community. Today and yesterday we discussed several aspects of our security, in particular what we can do together to strengthen NATO's response to current challenges and what we can do to strengthen our common cooperation in this regard. First of all, I am pleased that we have confirmed our firm position in several postures, in making NATO the strongest military alliance. It is very important, especially in the context of the NATO Summit in June. We also agreed that we will continue to support, maintain and strengthen the transatlantic tie that remains key to NATO and is crucial to our common defense and international security. In addition, we reaffirmed our strong commitment to stability and security in the region, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. I am glad that our three countries have the same strong position on maintaining NATO readiness on the eastern flank, said Zbigniew Rau.
He noted that the trilateral has not only a political dimension, "but also a military one" and announced that "a military contingent will soon be operational in Turkey".
In a few minutes we will resume our meetings with two very important NATO partners - Georgia and Ukraine, both of which stand by the challenges facing NATO today. Russia's extraordinary military activities on the border with Ukraine and Crimea are of concern to us. These are part of a wider pattern of destabilizing activities by Russia in the region. Let's hope they stop soon. We hope to take advantage of our meeting to voice our solidarity and support for Ukraine and Georgia. We also talked about potential actions aimed at strengthening NATO's activity and their resilience to help bring them even closer to NATO's aspirations, Poland's foreign minister further affirmed.
The Romania-Poland-Turkey trilateral meeting, at the level of the Foreign Ministers, started on Friday in Bucharest with a plenary session.