Will South Korea change its policy and send weapons to Ukraine?
At least that's what NATO hopes for.
The Secretary General of the Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, today called on Seoul to increase its aid to Kiev. In his meeting with senior South Korean officials, the Secretary General said that Ukraine "urgently needs more ammunition".
South Korea occupies an increasingly significant place in the global arms trade, and only recently signed contracts to supply hundreds of tanks to European countries.
One of them is the NATO company Poland, which six months ago purchased tanks and howitzers from Seoul in the amount of $5.8 billion. However, South Korean law prohibits the export of weapons to countries at war, and therefore offensive military aid to Kiev will require significant changes.
Stoltenberg told his hosts in Seoul that the circumstances of the time require rethinking and pointed to the policy change that took place in Norway and especially in Germany, which decided to supply weapons to Ukraine despite the war.
"If we believe in elections and democracy, if we don't want autocracy and tyranny to win, then they should get weapons," Stoltenberg said at the Chi Institute in Seoul.
Seoul is the first stop of the NATO Secretary General in Asia, which is designed to strengthen the ties between NATO and the democratic countries in the region such as South Korea and Japan in the face of the war in Ukraine and the tension with China. Following the war in Ukraine, the German leadership decided to rebuild the Bundeswehr, while Japan - A country that officially advocated pacifism - boosts its investments in security and made its procurement budget the third largest in the world.
Today the Russian newspaper "Vodomosti" reported that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit Moscow in February.
Russia and China are considered allies, but cooperate in a limited way: so far, for example, Beijing has refrained from supplying Russia with weapons, but does hold joint military exercises with it.
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