Opening remarks

Good morning.

Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate the fact that you are not in Luxembourg.

I will be speaking on the record as usual, and I will start by giving you a couple of pointers to the programme. And then we will turn over, for the substance, to our senior NATO official, who I will introduce in a second.

The Ministerial will start tomorrow, but quite late in the evening, with a working dinner. There will be no media opportunity so basically, we will be kicking off very early on Wednesday morning with the Doorstep of the Secretary General at 8:00am at the main entrance here.

Then, the working session of the North Atlantic Council, the first working session will start immediately afterwards, at 08:30. We will have a meeting with the new Ukrainian Foreign Minister in the NATO-Ukraine Commission at 11:30 and that will be followed by the press conference of the Secretary General at around 12:40pm.

After that the Ministers will have a working lunch at 28 and thereafter they will be meeting with our ISAF partners and the Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister as well as the UN Special Representative for Afghanistan, and the EU High Representative. Japan has also been invited.

And the final press conference by the Secretary General is planned for around 17:40. So this is the rough schedule.

Now for the substance.