French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to visit Romania next week where he will meet French troops stationed at a Black Sea base.
It will be the French president’s third visit, and the first since he was re-elected on April 24, said Digi24 quoting sources.
Mr Macron will meet Romanian President Klaus Iohannis during his June 15 visit which comes just after the Bucharest 9 Summit and ahead of the NATO Summit in Madrid on June 28-30.
France heads a NATO battle group known as Battle Group Forward Presence – BGFP,.which currently has about 800 troops and is expected to expand to 1,000 soldiers from several NATO countries.
„We were mobilized three months ago, at the beginning of March, and my battalion now has around 800 troops, 500 are French, 300 Belgians,” said colonel Vincent Minguet, commander of the NATO Battle Group in Romania, said at the end of last month.
“We are at the Mihail Kogălniceanu military base and now we have started the move to Cincu, where the battle group will be deployed” he said. Dutch troops will also join the battalion, he said.
France has also deployed a state-of-the-art surface-to-air defense system in Romania.
NATO Secretar-General Jens Stoltenberg is joining a Bucharest-9 summit on Friday, hosted by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and Polish President Andrzej Duda.
The summit comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth month. Romania and Poland are on the frontline and have seen the arrival of significant numbers of NATO troops in recent months.
Mr Macron visited Romania in 2017 and again in 2019 for a European Union summit.
French soldiers arrive in Romania to bolster NATO defenses after Russian invasion of Ukraine
