Joint press point

Prime Minister Plenković,

Andrej,

It’s really a great pleasure and honour to be here in Zagreb, and especially on this day, your Independene Day, so Happy Independence Day.

We are grateful for Croatia’s important role in NATO. You contribute to our shared security to our collective defence with, as you mentioned, your presence in our Enhanced Forward Presence in the Baltic region, in Lithuania, and in Poland. We also commend you for sending troops to Kosovo, to the NATO mission KFOR and also to the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, helping us to prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for international terrorists.

I’m also looking forward to welcoming troops from Croatia in our big exercise Trident Juncture later on this month.

And I also appreciate the fact that you are now investing more in defence. After years of cutting defence spending in most NATO Allied countries, we as an Alliance have now turned a corner. All Allies have started to increase, all Allies are moving in the right direction but we still have a long way to go and I welcome the fact that you have enshrined in a law that you will meet the 2% target by 2024, the target of spending 2% of GDP on defence.

For NATO of course it is also important the situation in this region. I just came from Belgrade where I participated in a big NATO exercise, it was not a military exercise, but a civil preparedness exercise.

And the reason why this exercise is important is that it shows that NATO Allies and partners in this region are able to work together, in addressing natural disasters as flooding, wild fires and earthquakes and we have seen that these kinds of natural disasters have been a problem in this region and also the rest of Europe. But the exercise was also important because it shows the strength of our partnerships in this region and I think to build partnerships with countries in the region which are not members of NATO is important because that’s a way to try to reduce tensions and avoid the conflicts that we saw in the 1990s. And as you mentioned, Prime Minister, we discussed the situation in the region including the situation in Skopje after the referendum, Kosovo, where NATO is present, and we also addressed the challenges in Bosnia-Herzegovina especially after the elections.

So once again thank you for welcoming me, thank you.