Joint press point by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez

Thank you so much, Prime Minister Sánchez, dear Pedro. It's great to be back in Madrid. Great to see you again. And thank you so much for welcoming me, my delegation, to this beautiful venue, to this place which is actually magnificent and an ideal place to host a NATO Summit.

So also many, many thanks to you and to the government of Spain for hosting the NATO Summit. This will be a transformative and very important Summit and you have provided the perfect, the best thinkable, possible facilities for conducting this important NATO Summit here in Madrid. I would also like to thank His Majesty for hosting the dinner tonight with all the Allied leaders, Heads of State and Government, but also with our partners who will participate throughout the Summit in different meetings and formats.

And I'd also like to thank all the technical staff, both the Spanish technical staff but also the NATO [staff]. We have now worked seamlessly together for many weeks enabling this Summit to take place.

Then, I would also like to thank you personally, Pedro, for your personal commitment to the transatlantic bond, to NATO, and to the importance of Europe and North America standing together. And also for the many contributions that Spain is making to our shared security, to our collective defence. Spain contributes to NATO missions, activities in the Baltic countries, in Iraq.

You host the NATO ships and the US ships at the Rota base. And you participate in many different missions and operations and we are grateful for all of that. And this strong Spanish commitment to NATO is then demonstrated with the fact that you now are hosting the Summit.

And also actually, this happens the same year as you mark the 40th anniversary of Spain joining our Alliance.

The Madrid Summit will be a pivotal Summit. We will agree a new Strategic Concept, the Madrid Strategic Concept, that will be the blueprint for NATO in a more dangerous and unpredictable world.

We will agree a fundamental shift of our deterrence and defence with more high readiness forces, with more forward defence, with more pre-positioned equipment.

We will agree a Comprehensive Assistance Package to Ukraine to help them uphold the right for self-defence. It is extremely important that we are ready to continue to provide support because Ukraine now faces brutality which we haven't seen in Europe since the Second World War.

And then, we hope to make progress on the accession of Finland and Sweden.

And then, of course, we will also state that to be able to defend in a more dangerous world we also need to invest more in our defences.

So I really look forward to this historic Summit in Madrid. Thank you so much once again, Pedro, Prime Minister Sánchez, for hosting us. And it's great to be here at this very well-organized venue for a well-organized and important, historic Summit of NATO.

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