The second question I have has come up through your remarks. It is about the EU. I want to discuss something that the foreign minister, Rinkevics, who was at a conference this year in Riga, mentioned. It is something that is very interesting to me. He said that NATO and EU membership should be complementary.
We have a certain situation right now in Europe in which you have four countries, as you know—parts of the Visegrad group—that are tilting rightward. You have Serbia, which wants to join the EU but wants to maintain military neutrality and does not want to join NATO. You have three other countries—Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia—that want to join the EU. You have Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus that don't want to join the EU.
You mentioned that right now there are 22 countries that have NATO and EU joint membership. When you look at the totality of the continent itself, what do you think the future will hold? It seems to me that if you look at the aspirations of European countries, most of them wanted to join the EU, and I think Russia was not so concerned as long as they didn't join NATO. Somehow now they have joined the EU and now some of them want to join NATO. I think Montenegro is the last country, per se, that is going to join NATO.
How do you see the continent going forward when you have a disparity between some countries that want the economic union and the advantages of the economic union, but don't necessarily want the military options also, especially Serbia specifically, because they've said they want the economic benefits but want to maintain military neutrality?
How are you going to reconcile all of those factors to make sure that the “near abroad” especially, which were affected by Russia, will still maintain the ability to aspire to what they want to achieve?