At his first NATO summit, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will ask European allies to invest more in defense. In anticipation of the meeting of 28 foreign ministers from Atlantic Alliance in Brussels, Rex Tillerson will be in Turkey on Thursday. Turkey is also a key NATO member, and Tillerson will talk to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about fighting jihadists in Syria.
The NATO summit should take place on April 5 and 6, but Tillerson announced he would not attend because Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit the United States at that time.
It was necessary to convince 27 other Nato Member States to move the meeting from March 31, so that Tillerson, as a minister of NATO founder countries, could attend. The main objective is to prepare the NATO Summit on May 25 in Brussels, where the US President should participate. It will be Trump's first trip to Europe, where he will meet with allies.
"The president was very clear, and his state secretary will repeat it on Friday: the US can no longer bear the disproportionate part of NATO defense costs, "a State Department diplomat warned.
The largest military budget
On the day after the meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who he received on March 17 in Washington, Trump said on Twitter that Berlin owes a huge sum of money to NATO and to Washington.
The world's first military force, with an annual budget that Trump wants to increase to $ 639 billion, provides 68 percent of defense spending for 28 NATO member states. And before coming to the Republican presidential government, Washington complained about the imbalance with regard to the European allies. At the NATO Summit in Wales in 2014, the Allies committed themselves to allocating two percent of the defense budget.
Obstacle to improving relations between the US and Russia
Rex Tillerson said in a telephone conversation with Ukrainian Presiden that Moscow's action in the east of Ukraine remains an obstacle to improving relations between the United States and Russia. In this telephone conversation that came the day after the death of the US observer of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in the east of Ukraine, the two officials stressed the need for all parties, especially separatist forces run by Russia, to immediately implement the agreement from the Minsk treaty, US administration spokesman Mark Toner said for OSCE.
The OSCE observer was killed
The OSCE announced on Sunday that its observer was killed in a mine explosion in the east of Ukraine. The murdered observer is the first victim of the Special Observation Mission (SMM) of the OSCE in Ukraine since it was deployed three years ago in that region. About 600 OSCE observers are monitoring compliance with the peace accords in the rebel section on the east of Ukraine, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the conflict in April 2014.
