DefMin Fifor: Romania has reached its goals at NATO summit

Romania has reached its goals at the recent NATO summit in Brussels, with the most important of them being hosting a three-star army corps NATO headquarters whose future architecture will be configured by this autumn, Romania's Defence Minister Mihai Fifor said on Friday.

"There will be a command. Initially, we started from this idea of a three-star army corps headquarters that we had proposed in the NATO ministerial meeting at the beginning of this year. Once again, we are extremely glad because, because that was the most important objective we had at the summit. And thanks to the efforts of MApN [Defence Ministry] and MAE [Foreign Ministry] (...) thanks to the efforts of the teams, we managed to achieve this extremely important objective for Romania," Fifor said at a news conference.

He explained that until the autumn the discussions on the command that Romania will host will be carried out at expert level.

"We are at the stage where until autumn we will discuss at expert level the architecture of this command, let's say a three-star command, and in autumn we can present Romania's proposal for the architecture of the command. I guess it is important the fact that Romania, through the presence of this three-star command, shows that it is indeed one of the most important players in this area of NATO, and that is why it is important to underline that was a very, very important objective for Romania," said Fifor.

He mentioned that at this year's NATO summit Romania had three major objectives to achieve.

"The first regarded Romania's offer to host a NATO army corps headquarters on its national soil, the second to strengthen NATO forward presence across the entire eastern flank, including in our region, and the third, of course, approaching the Black Sea subject in a separate format, if you wish. That was perhaps the most difficult part to achieve, but finally a summit format dedicated to complex Black Sea programmes, a format that Ukraine and Georgia were invited to join, got on the agenda of the summit (...) I was saying that Romania achieved its objectives. I mean the first of these, mainly the willingness to operate a land command and control capacity at corps-level, which we find in the final declaration, something that Romania receives and, I say, rightly so, because that is how we show that Romania is a well-structured partner and ally with a highly established military presence," said Fifor.

He also mentioned the strengthening of the NATO forward presence on the entire eastern flank. "We have always talked about a balanced approach of the eastern flank so that we have coherence on this flank. And at the NATO summit we said that we want full commissioning of the Craiova Multinational Brigade by the end of the year. Romania has got very substantive promises and we really hope that by the end of the year (...) the brigade will be fully operational (... ) I want to remind you that in the spring of this year we declared fully operational the multinational division as well. In other words, we show that Romania is also prepared in this respect to face any challenge in its region," said Fifor.

He called "relevant" the Black Sea approach at the summit. "Romania is, if you like, the country that lies between the complicated Black Sea area and the rather complicated area of the Western Balkans. We are the main security and stability provider in this area, which was also reinforced at the NATO summit in Brussels," said Fifor.