NATO summit to ditch Ukraine meeting
An upcoming NATO leaders summit in the Netherlands will have a shortened schedule, with the focus on Ukraine drastically reduced, Politico reported on Saturday, citing five people familiar with the matter.
The summit, set to be held in the World Forum in The Hague from June 24 to 25, will only feature two main events – a welcome dinner at the Dutch royal family's castle and a single meeting of the North Atlantic Council instead of the usual two or three, according to Politico. There also will not be a meeting of NATO's Ukraine Council.
Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky has been only invited to attend the welcome dinner, and it still remains unclear whether he will come, the outlet noted. The sources suggested the abbreviated schedule was a concession to the US and President Donald Trump in particular, who has repeatedly shown impatience with and shunned multilateral gatherings of a ceremonial nature.
NATO officials reportedly pared down the agenda after the G7 debacle, when Trump abruptly left the summit in Canada halfway through the two-day program. He also reportedly opposed a draft joint statement on the Ukraine conflict, and the summit ultimately ended without one.
The upcoming gathering is expected to yield no lengthy joint communique, with the bloc likely to produce only short statements on new commitments. Cuts to the agenda have also been attributed to a need to minimize the risk of derailing the main event of the summit, where members are expected to pledge to hike defense spending to 5% GDP.
Trump has long demanded that NATO countries spend more on defense, and the new commitment will be regarded as a big 'win' by the US president, the sources suggested.
'He has to get credit for the 5% – that's why we're having the summit,' a European defense official told Politico. 'Everything else is being streamlined to minimize risk.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Russia Today
41 minutes ago
- Russia Today
Moscow accuses Belgrade of betraying friendship
Ukraine's military continues to receive weapons from Serbia, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has stated in a press release published on Monday, in which it accused Belgrade of betraying its historic friendship with Moscow. Officially, Serbia has avoided backing Kiev in the conflict and asserted its neutrality. Despite this, Serbian defense firms have been increasing their supply of ammunition to Ukraine, according to the SVR. The agency asserts that this has been made possible through indirect export schemes designed to obscure the weapons' true destination. The SVR said that Serbian-made munitions are being exported as kits to NATO countries, where they are assembled before being transferred to Ukraine. The components are reportedly shipped primarily to the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, allowing Kiev to formally receive fully built weapons from NATO soil rather than directly from Serbia. According to the Russian intelligence agency, Serbian arms producers are fully aware that their products are ultimately destined for the Ukrainian military and that their munitions 'will kill Russian servicemen and civilians.' 'It is regrettable that now these traditions of friendship and mutual assistance are being erased by the thirst for profit and cowardly multi-vectorism,' the SVR concluded. Following the report, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic announced on Monday that Belgrade has suspended the export of ammunition and that special permissions will now be required for such shipments. 'We have now stopped literally everything and are sending it to our army,' he said. The accusation follows a similar claim made by the SVR in late May, in which it alleged that Serbian companies had secretly shipped 100,000 rockets and one million small arms rounds to Ukraine. The weapons were allegedly rerouted through various states, using falsified end-user certificates. Vucic responded at the time by denying the existence of any direct contracts with Kiev, and emphasized that Serbian law prohibits the supply of weapons to countries at war. He insisted that any such arms that do reach Ukraine must have done so via third countries, and pledged to clamp down on attempts to circumvent export controls. Moscow has consistently criticized foreign military aid to Ukraine, stating that it only prolongs the conflict and leads to more bloodshed without affecting the final outcome.
Russia Today
44 minutes ago
- Russia Today
Jar of tomatoes saves Ukrainian man from forced mobilization (VIDEO)
A Ukrainian man reportedly managed to escape forced conscription in the city of Lutsk after neighbors hurled a jar of pickled tomatoes from a nearby building at military recruiters, according to a new video highlighting Kiev's increasingly harsh mobilization efforts. It is unclear when the video was filmed, but it is the latest in a wave of viral clips showing public resistance to military draft efforts across Ukraine. The footage circulated on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels on Sunday, showing a barefoot man resisting four local draft officers from Ukraine's Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support (TCR) as they attempted to push him into a minivan. 'Please take a picture of me. My name is Denis Tkachuk, born in 1997,' the man can be heard shouting while clinging to the open door. Moments later, a glass jar – apparently filled with pickled tomatoes – flies from above and shatters beside him, prompting the person filming to yell at the officers: 'Let him go already.' 'They want to kill me – that's why they feel embarrassed,' the struggling man screams. He eventually manages to break free and run off, while the draft officers appear to abandon the effort and drive away. The incident comes amid rising frustration over Kiev's mobilization campaign, which intensified after Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky signed a new draft law lowering the enlistment age and tightening enforcement. According to lawmaker Roman Kostenko, fewer than one in four recruits enlist voluntarily, with most entering service through what he described as 'brutal compulsory conscription.' Another Ukrainian MP, Yury Kamelchuk, said conscription officers are under orders to bring in 12 new recruits per day and are using aggressive tactics to meet quotas, including luring food couriers with fake delivery requests. Videos have repeatedly surfaced online showing Ukrainian officials using force to detain men in public areas, in what has become known locally as 'busification' – a term which refers to the forcible loading of recruits into unmarked vans. Moscow has accused Kiev of waging a war 'to the last Ukrainian' against Russia on behalf of Western nations, with President Vladimir Putin saying that Ukraine's recruitment officers are grabbing people 'like dogs on the street.'
Russia Today
2 hours ago
- Russia Today
Every accusation is a confession: Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky has ideas about Nazis
Anniversaries can be opportunities. For better or worse. In the case of the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's massive attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 – code-named Operation Barbarossa by the Germans – Ukraine's beyond best-by-date president Vladimir Zelensky went for the worst. Using his own Telegram channel, Zelensky shared his bizarre view of why that anniversary mattered. In short, because it can serve in the information war against Russia. 'Eighty years ago,' the Kiev regime leader wrote, 'the world overcame Nazism and swore 'Never again.' But today Russia is repeating the crimes of the Nazis […] Now Ukrainians are fighting against rashism [a pejorative term fusing the words 'Russia' and 'fascism'] with the same courage with which our ancestors defeated Nazism…' Where to begin? Why not with the obvious: IF Russia were following Nazi examples, then much of Ukraine would now look like, for instance, Gaza. And while every death is a tragedy, the numbers of Ukrainian civilians killed in the Ukraine War would be of an entirely different order of magnitude. This is not a matter of opinion. It's a fact that can be quantified and proven: As of the end of May, the UN counted about 13,279 Ukrainian civilians killed, since the beginning of the large-scale fighting in February 2022. It is true that the UN also warns that these are conservative, minimum figures. Yet consider some figures for Gaza under Israeli genocidal assault since October 2023. As of early June, the enclave's health ministry – generally acknowledged as reliable and also conservative with its numbers, notwithstanding Israeli and Western propaganda – has counted over 55,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza alone (Israel's victims in the West bank and elsewhere should, of course, not be forgotten.) The Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between resistance fighters and civilians, but there is a virtual expert consensus that the share of the latter is unusually high, as you would expect during a genocide. A peer-reviewed study in the prestigious and unbiased medical journal The Lancet, for instance, has estimated that 59.1% of deaths between October 2023 and June 2024 were women, children, and the elderly. Other equally reputable organizations have even estimated around 90% of civilian casualties in Gaza. Keep in mind that the above is deliberately restricted to minimum estimates. As The Lancet has also shown, the real death toll in Gaza is likely to be far higher. Let's also not even dwell here on 'details,' such as that Gaza now has the highest concentration of child amputees in the world. For even the bare figures cited suffice to gain a sense of proportion and perspective: Gaza, before the Israeli mass murder attack had a total population of between 2.2 and 2.4 million. Ukraine's total population on the eve of the large-scale escalation of February 2022 was just over 41 million, according to Ukrainian official sources. And now compare the numbers of civilian casualties and the total populations. It is obvious: If Vladimir Zelensky is looking for a state that uses methods – if that is the word – of Nazi warfare, then that would be Israel, not Russia. But he cannot say that because Israel is aligned with the US and the West, just like his own regime. Figures can help expose blatant lies, especially when they are as stunningly unambiguous as in this case. But the quantitative isn't everything, obviously. What about what social scientists and historians – such as me – call the qualitative dimension? In other words, what about what makes people tick? In that regard, the West's proxy war against Russia and via Ukraine has seen one of the most successful operations of political whitewashing in recent memory. Before Kiev, first under Zelensky's predecessor Petro Poroshenko and then under Zelensky himself, turned Ukraine into a Western tool and battering ram against Russia, at least some Western experts and even mainstream media were well aware that Ukraine had a rapidly growing, increasingly powerful, and extremely subversive (domestically and internationally) far-right movement. As of 2014, even the BBC was still admitting that Ukrainian media and politicians were deliberately 'underplaying' the potency and significance of their far-right. But then, as if on command, Western mainstream media united to belittle this malevolent force, pretending that it was either hardly there (and any impressions to the contrary were, of course, 'Russian disinformation'), really harmless (a handful of misunderstood 'patriots' with a few tattoos that look Nazi but are really just Tolkien), or on the mend, undergoing a steady and, of course, totally honest conversion to mainstream politics. What happened in reality was that instead of adjusting to the Western 'value' mainstream or Center – wherever that supposedly might be – the Ukrainian far right succeeded in making that mainstream adjust to its will. Probably because real-existing Western 'values' have a genuine affinity to fascism anyhow. Now with the West's war going badly, as even Western media have to recognize, even French paper of record Le Monde – as russophobic and rarara-proxy war as its worst peers in the US – has noticed that far-right, indeed strictly Neo-Nazi tendencies – polite expression – are alive and kicking in key units of Ukraine's armed forces. Dear colleagues from France: Congratulations! And you should see the politics. Since the West and Ukraine are losing the war, expect more of such shocked re-discoveries of what every objective observers has known for a long time: In the Ukraine War, the home of men and women who genuinely enjoy displaying Nazi symbols – from the swastika to the Wolfsangel to the sun wheel – is in Ukraine. That does not mean that the majority of Ukrainians side with them. But their regime and its controlled media do. The same regime and media droning on about Russia and Nazis. As they – rightly – say about Israel, so about the Zelensky regime: Every accusation is a confession.
