The idea of such an arrangement was launched by Norway’s former foreign minister and initiator of the Barents cooperation Thorvald Stoltenberg.
The newspaper Helsingin Sanomat quotes Wallin saying such alliance is not even very strange. We have a statement in the EU on support, so why shouldn’t we have that in the Nordic region, which remains politically, economically, and culturally our traditional reference group?” Wallin said.
The defence study report was presented by Thorvald Stoltenberg to the Foreign Ministers of the Nordic countries in Oslo in early February, as previously reported by BarentsObserver.com.
