NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, said during his speech on the situation in Ukraine that the alliance must also support Georgia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

NATO has provided support to Georgia, BiH and Moldova for many years, he said.

“We helped them with capacity building, reforms, strengthening their defence and security institutions, holding common exercises.

“We didn’t make any final decisions but it’s a broad agreement that we need to do more to support these countries. This is about scaling up the things we will do there like strengthening their defence and security institutions, reforms, training, but also potentially adding more activities in support of these countries. Because what you are seeing with Ukraine is that they too may be at risk, exposed for even more intervention, subversion and potentially even attacks by the Russian armed forces and the Russian Federation,” he said.

Asked if NATO sees any concrete threat of Russian invasion on the three countries, Stoltenberg said all three countries face different types of risks.

“What they have in common is that we have seen Russia try to exercise their power, to intimidate them partially by subversion, interference in domestic political processes or by a military invasion,” he said, recalling that there are Russian troops in both Georgia and Moldova without the consent of those two sovereign governments.

“In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we see a very fragile and unstable situation with inflammatory rhetoric and serious challenges to the unity of that state,” Stoltenberg said, adding that the three states faced serious challenges even before the war in Ukraine that were inflicted by Russia.

The risk has increased and therefore NATO needs to step up its support and have a serious discussion as NATO on what they can do to strengthen them in the face of Russian threats, he said.