WIREDGOV

Ben Wallace travelled to Oslo yesterday to meet with counterparts and representatives from all nine other nations – Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

The group discussed how Russia’s brutal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine has impacted European security and how the JEF might contribute to longer term capacity building and training across Europe.

They also rehearsed JEF’s joint response activity through a table-top exercise, demonstrating the nations’ ability to cooperate in times of crisis, including how JEF and NATO would work together in such a scenario.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said:

I was delighted to meet with my nine fellow defence counterparts from the Joint Expeditionary Force to deepen our relations and to support Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO.

After the meeting, the ministers issued a joint statement to strongly welcome Sweden and Finland’s applications to join NATO.

The JEF is a UK-led force, comprising 10 nations working together to deliver forces at high readiness, across a range of roles, complementing NATO and European security. The coalition focuses on security in the Baltic Sea region, the High North and the North Atlantic, where its members are located.

The coalition is complementary to NATO’s wider strategic posture, which originated from the 2014 NATO summit in Wales. Led by the UK as framework nation, it is agile and responsive, acting either as smaller coalitions or with the weight of the full grouping, as ten nations communicating with one voice.