Original title: And now… 200 million euros for a NATO membership card: Macedonia will have to buy US weapons
The first part of the title of the text on the portal is completely inaccurate. In an interview with “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov makes no mentions on the number or amount of money that Republic of North Macedonia should allocate for NATO membership. On a journalist question, how the membership of Montenegro and North Macedonia will reflect, or threaten Russia’s national security, Lavrov responds that NATO wants to control all countries in the Russian surrounding. He refers to the referendum in North Macedonia, for which he says is a precedent, because according to Lavrov, the referendum question contained three questions, not one, and that the referendum vote was carried out under the strong influence of the West.
Link to the original article here.
Link to Lavrov’s original interview here.
Link to the archived original article here.Source: vecer.mk
NATO membership: NATO does not have a fixed annual membership fee. Funding NATO has been agreed between member states with a special formula. According to that formula North Macedonia will pay around 1.2 million euros per a year, which is 0, 0721 percent of the NATO’s budget. This has recently been reviewed and analyzed by F2N2.
For a comparison, Albania contributes with 0.0841 percent to the NATO budget. What the United States ask, as the biggest contributors to NATO, is other member-states to project the budget of its own defense to two percent of gross domestic product. But even this requirement is not binding, it serves only as a given direction to increase the costs in its own defense to 2% by 2024.
Procurement of weapons: In the part where Lavrov says that with the membership to NATO, North Macedonia will have to buy US weapons, the current NATO policy is that there should exist compatibility within the Alliance. Hence, NATO does not oblige allies to buy weapons only from the US or NATO member-states, but the same should be in line with NATO’s defense standards in a way that would not threaten the security of NATO allies. More on this issue you can read in the interview of General Petr Pavel, in his capacity as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.
Besides that, General Pavel points out that while “every nation is free to make its own defense-related decisions, Turkey’s plans to buy the S-400 system would prevent Ankara from being part of any integrated air defense system with NATO allies, which may result in other technical limitations. ”
The problem with the purchase of weapons and defense systems from Russia is consisted in expensive servicing and maintenance of the equipment, as well as bad cooperation with Russia in this field. To illustrate, Ukraine had several unsuccessful attempts to service the equipment purchased from Russia and the former Soviet Union, while Bulgaria had costs of $ 49 million for servicing a total of 16 jets of MiG-29 type.
Authorities in Sofia, tried for several times to find another company that will perform the service, but all attempts were unsuccessful.
Membership of North Macedonia to NATO: NATO is a strategic commitment of all governments since its independence to date. All efforts and activities undertaken by the state in this direction:Source: Info center for Euro-Atlantic Integration
