Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Jens Stoltenberg said that seven of the NATO member states have achieved the military spending target for the bloc in 2022, which is one less country than the number of countries that succeeded in that in 2021, before Russia started the war on Ukraine.

At a news conference, Stoltenberg urged the 30-nation members to boost investment in defense faster, noting that the alliance initially expected two more countries to meet the spending target.

The annual Stoltenberg 2022 report showed Greece, the US, Lithuania, Poland, Britain, Estonia, and Latvia met that target.

Washington has been pushing its European allies for years to increase their military spending, and spending by European members and Canada increased by 2.2% in 2022, bringing the total increases in the last eight years to $350 billion.

At a summit in Wales in 2014, NATO leaders agreed to the goal of moving towards spending at least 2% of their GDP on defence within a decade.

That decision was a reaction to what the alliance saw as a sharp deterioration in the security situation in Europe months after Russia annexed Crimea.

Nine years after Wells’ pledge, and nearly a year after the start of the Russian war in Ukraine, the allies began discussions a few weeks ago about how to set the military spending target.

Next July, a decision is expected to be issued at the alliance summit in Lithuania. Meanwhile, the NATO Secretary-General indicated that he sees the spending target at 2% as “a floor, not a ceiling” in the future

Source: Qatar News Agency