Doorstep statement

Good afternoon,

I’m looking forward to meet the EU Defence ministers again. I met them last month in Valletta and now I will meet them again today. And we are now really taking the NATO-EU cooperation to new levels. We have transformed the cooperation and we are delivering a lot of concrete results.

Last December we agreed on 42 concrete measures, and we are now implementing those measures. And High-Representative Federica Mogherini and I, we will issue a report next month on the progress we are making in implementing the measures strengthening NATO-EU cooperation. And just to mention one example of how important this cooperation is,

I will mention cyber. Because cyber threats is something we have to take very seriously and last year NATO experienced 500 cyber incidents on average every month and that’s a 60% increase compared to the previous year, and last Friday, NATO issued a warning to all Allies after the ransomware attack we saw. And we also shared that warning with the European Union and the European Union shared their information with NATO. We have also recently granted the European hub for cyber security access to NATO’s malware information sharing platform so now NATO and the European Union are able to share information in real time on cyber attacks, as the attack we saw last weekend.

So this is just one example of how we are making progress, step by step, in many different areas, to strengthen the practical cooperation between NATO and the European Union. Cooperation between NATO and the European Union will also be an important issue we will highlight when NATO leaders meet exactly in one week from now in Brussels. That will be a short meeting but it will be an important meeting because it will be the first meeting where the new US president and the new French president meet all the other Allied leaders here in Brussels. I’m looking forward to the meeting, we will address especially two topics: transatlantic bond and burden sharing, and NATO’s efforts to step up our contribution to the fight against terrorism. So I’m looking forward to welcoming all the leaders to Brussels, to the NATO leaders meeting here next week.