NATO Secretary General with the Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk - November 13, 2024

Prime Minister, dear Donald, thank you for the extremely warm welcome here in Warsaw. We are friends, and it's great to work again, and I'm looking forward to do that over the coming years.

Your contributions to our Alliance, they are many, and they are increasing. You lead by example on defence spending. Here it says 4% but I believe it is now closer to 4.7% of GDP. And with that, more than any other NATO Ally. You have now the plans in place to make this happen and also to work on this, to increase this even further in 2025.

With this, you are building one of the biggest armies in NATO. Your troops are deployed in Latvia and in Romania. Polish soldiers contribute to our missions in Kosovo and Iraq. You host one of NATO's multinational battlegroups strengthening our defences on the eastern flank. You just talked about the reinforcement of the border together with the Baltics and Finland. And I applaud that initiative.

And you are a leading supporter for Ukraine. Poland provides crucial military aid and hosts over 1 million Ukrainian refugees, and it might be even much more. And you host the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Centre. Our continued collective support to Ukraine remains critical. This is what we discussed.

Now, throughout the coming winter, but also for the long term, if necessary, we have to make sure that defence aid will keep flowing to Ukraine and that we are able to get them from a position where they are losing territory that they are able to stabilize the front and then to win back from the Russians what they have lost.

The war has taken a dangerous new turn, with North Korean troops now being deployed to Russia. And this is not for free. Putin is paying for this. He is paying for this through not only money, but also through technology. He is supplying missile technology to North Korea.

And this is now presenting a threat, not only to us here in Europe, but also to South Korea, to Japan and to the United States mainland, and of course, China is part of the war effort by sanction circumvention, by dual use goods.

He [President Putin] has a close relationship with Iran, and he is getting military aid from Iran to help him with the war effort against Ukraine. But he is paying in money, and that money is being spent by Iran on continuing its negative influence in the Middle East and beyond.

So this is getting more and more a situation where the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo Pacific, really have to be seen as one theatre, and not as two separate ones. And that's why we have that strong relationship with Japan, South Korea, but also with Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, with the European Union. And our security, therefore, now more and more is global, and we have to look at this as a global issue.

So I welcome Poland's commitment to building the stronger ties with the Indo-Pacific. You are one of the countries really pushing for this. But also, as you just mentioned your steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine. Today, we also discussed how we can further strengthen our defences by investing more in capabilities and ramping up our defence production. It is really critical that we can do that. We need more and better capabilities, and we need them faster.

And we also have to implement new insights and learnings in our defence industry, because our adversaries are doing this at a high speed. When you look at the defence production now in Russia, but also in China, they are ramping up what they are doing, we have to do the same, and that means kill the bureaucracy wherever possible, get things going, new production lines, new shifts, etc.

And to ensure a fair burden sharing of this responsibility, this includes our financial pledge of 40 billion euros in military aid in 2024, and the new NATO Command in Wiesbaden to oversee security assistance and training - NSATU. Both of these, the pledge and the Command in Wiesbaden, ensure that Europe continues to take on more responsibility for sustaining support to Ukraine.

Prime Minister, dear Donald, again, thank you for your hospitality, thank you for your friendship, and thank you for Poland's huge contribution to NATO. Thank you.