MOSCOW, June 11 The Bucharest Nine countries will end the summit in Riga without a joint declaration due to the lack of consensus on Ukraine, Bulgarian President Rumen Radev said.
The leaders of the Bucharest Nine countries are meeting in the Latvian capital on Tuesday.
«The meeting will not end with a joint declaration by all countries, as before, but only with a statement by the two co-chairs due to the lack of full consensus on how to achieve a settlement of the conflict in Ukraine,» Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) quotes Radev as explaining before the start of the forum.
At Radev’s suggestion, the text obliging each B9 country to provide military assistance to Kyiv was excluded from the original version of the statement.
«As a result, a position was adopted that each country should decide at its own discretion whether to help Ukraine and in what way — militarily, financially or humanitarianly… I see this as a certain success in support of common sense and an important step towards shifting the focus from finding a solution to this war on the battlefield… to finding a solution through negotiations in accordance with the UN Charter,» the Bulgarian president said.
The Bucharest Nine was created on the initiative of the presidents of Poland and Romania to strengthen NATO's eastern flank and develop military cooperation between the countries. The first official summit took place in November 2015 in Bucharest. The leaders of Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Poland and Romania last met in Warsaw in February 2023. US President Joe Biden and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also took part in the event. At that time, the presidents of the Bucharest Nine countries spoke in favor of an open door policy in NATO and the European Union for Ukraine and in favor of strengthening NATO's presence on the eastern flank Alliance.