Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday told the B9 Summit that “Central and Eastern Europe are under Russian threat.”
Zelensky, a late arrival to the summit in Bucharest touched down Wednesday afternoon on a A319 Ukrainian plane, believed to be stationed in Poland for safety reasons.
He went straight to the summit at the Cotroceni presidential palace to join fellow guests Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary-General and Polish President Karol Nawrocki.
“This format is important,” he told NATO and regional leaders. “Central and Eastern Europe are under Russian threat.”
He told participants from nine countries in the region and NATO that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine should not happen elsewhere.
NATO Allies’ airspace has been violated by Russian drones regularly in the past two years. Moscow has denied they are intentional but neighboring countries see the breaches as a test of their resolve and a gauging of their response.
Since Russia’s invasion, Sweden and Finland, which were previously neutral, joined NATO.
The Bucharest Nine (B9) format was launched in 2014 as a Polish-Romanian initiative aimed at coordinating positions and exchanging views in the field of security between the nine countries located across the Baltic and Black Sea regions.
The Bucharest Nine comprises Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 saying it posed an existential threat as it had been invited to become a member of the defensive military alliance. Ukraine received the invitation to join NATO in Bucharest 2008, but there were no concrete plans or a timeline for membership, even 14 years later when the invasion began.
