Off the wire
• More than 23,000 asylum seekers cross Austrian border over weekend  • U.S. Central Command head visits Abu Dhabi  • Xinhua Insight: China, ASEAN e-commerce, promising with challenges  • China is model for Slovakia in broadband internet access introduction  • Latvian minister faces fine for forgetting to declare 1 mln euro loan to son  • Nigeria to host ECOWAS summit on political crisis in Burkina Faso  • Third China-CEE education policy dialogue starts in Poland  • 1st LD Writethru: Greek Leftist leader Alexis Tsipras sworn in as PM  • Spanish stock market rises 0.10 pct, closes at 9,856 points  • Bank of Spain warns Catalonia's independence could cause "corralito"  
You are here: 　 Home

NATO can defend Baltic states: commander

Xinhua, September 22, 2015 Adjust font size:

NATO has vast resources at its disposal and can effectively defend the Baltic states, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (Deputy SACEUR), told reporters in the Latvian capital city Riga.

NATO is confident it can effectively defend the Baltic region, Bradshaw, who is attending a training event for the Alliance's senior military officers in Riga, told the journalists.

Commenting earlier reports that NATO's armoured vehicles might have problems travelling across the Baltic states' swampy terrain, Bradshaw said: "All of these issues affect an aggressor as well as a defender. A defender seeks to make an advantage out of these things. I would say that anything that inhibits armoured access is a positive advantage."

"The resources available to NATO are huge. They are proportionate to the size of the Alliance and the task that we face in collective defence," Bradshaw explained.

Bradshaw had arrived in Riga for Steadfast Pyramid and Steadfast Pinnacle 2015 exercises the Latvian Defence Academy is hosting for 48 senior officers from NATO member states, Finland and Sweden. Endit