Yesterday at 23:53
Photo from Ukrinform–UATV
During a press briefing in Brussels, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, said that the Alliance has been helping Ukraine with strengthening its cyber defenses.
“We are doing that through our trust funds. We have a trust fund for cyber defence, and by providing funding and support in strengthening the cyber defences, the cyber capabilities of Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said. “We also help them with defending their own networks and their own infrastructure. ”
At the moment, NATO is helping Ukraine to set up a cyber incident response center.
Stoltenberg also spoke about Russia’s excessive control of ships coming to Ukrainian ports in the Azov Sea and their military build up there. He said that NATO is following the situation “very closely.”
“We are concerned because what we see is that Russia is impeding normal civilian traffic, commercial vessels, and, of course, that’s a problem for Ukraine, which has seen that normal traffic from some of its harbours, in Mariupol and other places, has been impeded or there have been problems with the normal traffic in and out.”
” I think just is one example of a pattern we have seen, that Russia illegally annexed Crimea, then continued to destabilise especially Donbas, but also through the activities in the Azov Sea they continue to try to destabilise Ukraine.”
“So, what NATO does is that we provide support with political support, with practical support, partly within the different NATO programmes, trust funds and so on, but of course NATO allies also provide support bilaterally to Ukraine, and again this is about partly political, helping to modernise the Ukrainian armed forces, the security institutions, different trust funds, but also about equipment and other kinds of direct support.”
“We also strongly support the efforts to find a political solution to fully implement the Minsk agreement, which is the only viable way to a peaceful settlement of the conflict and the problems we see in and around Ukraine, including the Azov Sea.”
Stoltenberg added that he promised President Petro Poroshenko continued support from the Alliance.
