The Minister of National Defense announced this Wednesday that Portugal will participate with 50 million euros in the initiative to acquire weapons from the United States of America (USA) to make them available to Ukraine. The announcement was made by Nuno Melo at the end of a ministerial meeting at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in Brussels, Belgium.
“We announced that we will invest 50 million euros in PURL [iniciativa das necessidades prioritárias da Ucrânia]in the same way that we announced that we will invest ten million euros in the British drone initiative […]despite being a British initiative, has invariably fallen on the production of national drones, therefore, It is also an investment in the national defense industry“, maintained the Minister of National Defense.
Nuno Melo clarified that the value is included in the 221 million euros that were already part of the commitment that Portugal did with Ukraine for this year, so in 2025 there will be no more money to support the country invaded by Russia more than three years ago.
Asked whether he agrees that NATO’s European member states should buy weapons from the USA and that Washington should not be included in these accounts, the government official replied that Ukraine has urgent needs for weapons which, “in many cases, are not manufactured with such urgency in Europe”.
The minister considered that the important thing is that Ukraine has the equipment it needs to win the war. Minutes earlier, NATO’s secretary general announced that 16 NATO member states had already committed to this initiative.