President Rumen Radev to Join NATO Summit

President Rumen Radev will participate in the NATO summit today in Brussels. During today`s meeting presidents of both the USA and France - Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron - are about to join in for the first time.

The two main points of the discussion will entail the implementation of the plan for increasing the military expenditures by up to 2% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the fight against terrorism.

Each country is expected to present their approach to boosting their defense finance.

NATO is currently forced to be very attentive and to set off more funds, scientific and technical resources due to the advent of hybrid wars, hybrid threats and even for reinforcing its own cyber security. At the last conference, Jens Stoltenberg revealed that countries such as Lithuania and Latvia are drawing near to the 2% threshold, alongside with Romania and some other member countries. He also added that this increase is not expected to be rapid, yet it is undesirable a decrease in military expenditures to be tolerated.

Currently, only 5 member countries had managed to fulfill the 2% requirement - the USA, the UK, Greece, Poland and Estonia. Bulgaria had reached 1,33% for the past year and for 2015 the amount spent on defense comes up to 1,30% of the GDP.  1% and less show not only the European small states such as Luxembourg and Iceland, but also Spain and Italy, which are, after all, frontier states.