Prague has already sent Kiev everything it can from its weapons stockpiles, Czech President Petr Pavel says Czech President Petr Pavel © AFP / Vladimir Simicek

The Czech Republic has already done everything it can to help Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, President Petr Pavel has said. The nation’s capacity to produce more ammunition is limited due to workforce shortages, he added.

“We have not only delivered what we could from our own stocks, but also bought material abroad,” Pavel said in an interview with Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday.

German newspaper Die Welt claims in an opinion piece that Turkey and Hungary should not be trusted within the NATO alliance. The paper writes that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to block Sweden’s NATO accession, and Hungary wants EU money in exchange for approving the membership of both nations.

The US Army has officially opened its first permanent military garrison on NATO’s “eastern flank” in a ceremony on Tuesday. 

Stretching from the Baltics to the Black Sea, the eastern portion of the North Atlantic bloc is made up of eight nations – all former members of the USSR or Warsaw Pact. The US Army’s V Corps will now have a lasting presence at Camp Kosciuszko in Poland. 

As Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Moscow today, Putin accused the West of attempting to curb Russia and China's progress.

In an article published by the People's Daily newspaper, he asserted that the Western world is trying to divide the Eurasian space into military blocs to contain the two countries' development. Putin went on to say that the crisis in Ukraine, which he believes is being fueled by the West, is a "manifestation of its desire to retain its international dominance and preserve the unipolar world order."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Ankara would approve Finland’s NATO application before the country’s May election. Erdoğan made the announcement after meeting with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in Ankara.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visited the Troll A offshore natural gas platform off the west coast of Norway on Friday (17 March 2023), together with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Equinor CEO Anders Opedal.

“We have seen how President Putin has tried to use energy as a weapon throughout the war against Ukraine. And Norwegian gas has helped to respond to that…,” Mr Stoltenberg said. He added that gas installations “are vital for our economies, for our industries, but also, therefore, for our security.”

Kosovo-Metohija Serbs were targeted by a pogrom 19 years ago, on March 17-19, 2004.

It was the second large pogrom Serbs in the province suffered at the hands of ethnic Albanians after the end of the 1999 NATO aggression on Serbia, then part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Previously, approximately a quarter of a million Serbs and other non-Albanians were expelled from Kosovo-Metohija in June 1999 in the presence of international troops.

NATO military planners want to designate an additional 300,000 troops to be positioned along the eastern edge of the alliance on the border with Russia in order to forestall any thought by Moscow of expanding the war in Ukraine.

There’s only one small problem; they don’t know where they’re going to get the weapons and ammunition.

“The current rate of consumption compared to the current rate of production of ammunition,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in early March, “is not sustainable.”