Foreign Affairs Minister Ditmir Bushati attended the meeting of Foreign Ministers of NATO member countries, held in Brussels today.

This meeting follows the Warsaw Summit. NATO member countries’ Foreign Ministers discussed a variety of important topics to the Alliance and Euro-Atlantic security such as the political framework of the cooperation between NATO and the EU, further strengthening of transatlantic interconnection, projecting stability, security challenges facing our region, relations with Ukraine as well as the progress made in the framework of the "Resolute Support" NATO mission in Afghanistan.

The first session of the meeting addressed the cooperation between NATO and the EU and was attended by the High Representative Vice President Federica Mogherini and important NATO partner countries, Sweden and Finland. Ministers discussed the possibilities of increasing cooperation between NATO and the EU in facing common challenges of security and adopted a Joint Declaration which defines the work to strengthen cooperation between the two organizations in the future.

In his address, Minister Bushati stated inter alia the importance of intensification of the cooperation between NATO and the EU to face effectively the current challenges of security, taking as an example of this cooperation our region and especially Kosovo, where both NATO and the EU have marked a number of positive accomplishments over the years.

At the following session, Ministers shared their views on the important topic of projecting stability by analyzing threats from terrorism and NATO's commitment to the security challenges that come from the South.

In this Ministerial, our country introduced a series of important contributions, either in the fields of defense and discouragement, or in Projecting Stability and above all within a short time since the Summit of Warsaw in July this year.

As regards Projecting Stability, besides sending just few days ago the ship "Oriku" to participate in the NATO operation in the Aegean Sea, what, among other things, marks a milestone in the context of participation of our country in international operations, also sending an Albanian military contingent in Iraq as part of the Alliance's training mission is expected to completed in January 2017. Furthermore, our country will double its participation in the RSM mission in Afghanistan. We also will increase significantly our participation in the NATO KFOR mission in Kosovo over the next year. Along with several other member countries, Albania will be part of a multinational battalion led by Canada, which will be deployed in Latvia as part of efforts to secure the borders of the alliance but even beyond.

In addition, the first informal trilateral meeting of Foreign Ministers of Albania Ditmir Bushati, of Croatia Davor Ivo Stier and of Montenegro Srdjan Darmanovic took place in Brussels today.

Talks dwelt on a number of issues that constitute mutual interest and gradual institutionalization of a trilateral cooperation among the Adriatic countries in the Western Balkans, as well as on cooperation in political matters and the fields of security, infrastructure, environment, energy and tourism, taking into consideration that in these areas the Western Balkan countries share the challenges and commitments related to the integration processes.

Ministers of the three countries underlined the need to find common denominators to accelerate the region's integration into the EU, in the spirit of the Berlin Process for the Western Balkans.