Greece is among 7 members of the NATO bloc that completed the plan for the purchase of weapons in 2022

According to the alliance’s 2022 annual report, Greece was among 7 of 30 NATO countries that met the bloc’s military spending target of 2% of GDP, one country less than in 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking before the meeting, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg urged allies to increase investment in arms purchases faster. He told reporters at a press conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels that the alliance initially expected two more countries to complete the task. “But as the GDP of the two allies increased more than expected, the two bloc countries that we expected to be at 2% are now slightly below 2%,” he said.

Stoltenberg did not say which countries had reached the target, but he referred to NATO’s annual report, which will be released later on Tuesday. The report states that the seven countries include Greece, which has the highest spending as a percentage of GDP (3.54), the US, Lithuania, Poland, the UK, Estonia and Latvia. He urged the Allies to further increase their military spending. “There is no doubt that we need to acquire more weapons and do it faster. The current pace when it comes to increasing spending on arms purchases is not high enough,” Stoltenberg said. “In a more dangerous world, we need to invest more in defense.”

At the Wales Summit in 2014, NATO leaders agreed to move towards spending at least 2% of their GDP on defence, within a decade. This decision was then a reaction to what the alliance perceived as a serious deterioration in the security situation in Europe, a few months after Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.

Nearly a decade after the pledge, and a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO allies began discussions a few weeks ago on how to adapt the spending target. A decision is expected at the NATO summit in Lithuania in July, and Stoltenberg said he sees the 2% target as a low, not a high.

Several NATO members (we are talking about the Baltic countries, Poland and the US) are pushing for increased military spending, given that war rages in Europe, while others do not want to increase commitments.

PS Greece has fulfilled and even exceeded the NATO plan for the purchase of weapons, while infrastructure, health care, education remained in the background. But in the NATO leadership they praised us …

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