Fifteen European countries in German missile shield initiative

Defence Ministers from fourteen European NATO countries, plus Finland, signed a letter of intent on Thursday for the development of a "European Sky Shield Initiative", a project led by Germany, to protect Europe from missile attacks.
 
The signing took place on the margins of a meeting of allied defence ministers at Atlantic Alliance headquarters. The 14 NATO allies who signed were Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United Kingdom, while Finland, a country in the process of joining the Atlantic Alliance, also joined.
 
NATO explained in a statement that the initiative aims to create a European air and missile defence system through the common procurement of equipment by European nations. This will strengthen NATO's integrated air and missile defence, the organisation said. "This commitment is even more crucial today as we witness Russia's ruthless and indiscriminate missile attacks in Ukraine, killing civilians and destroying critical infrastructure," said NATO deputy secretary general Mircea Geoana.
 
Geoana welcomed Germany's "leadership" in this project, and hoped that its new assets, "fully interoperable and seamlessly integrated into NATO's air and missile defence", would "significantly improve the Alliance's ability to defend against all air and missile threats".
 
Spain will consider the request if it arrives 
 
The Spanish Defence Minister, Margarita Robles, told a press conference during the NATO meeting that Spain is willing to consider a request to participate in this project if it is forwarded to Spain, something that has not happened so far. "Spain is collaborating with Germany on several projects, but in this specific case we believe that our participation in the NATO missile defence shield is appropriate," she explained.
 
The minister alluded to the recent bilateral meeting between the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in which the latter "already explained that it is an internal German decision".
 
"No request has been made to us. We deal with all the requests that are made to us, we study them and we see if it is possible or not," she said. "Spain has not been formally approached," she insisted, adding that "when the proposal is made, obviously, as President Sánchez said, we will study it as soon as it is made".
 
Robles wanted to "make it very clear that Spain's commitment to NATO is total and absolute", and recalled that at the moment there are "1,300 men and women of the Spanish Armed Forces who are under the NATO flag". She also stressed Spain's commitment to support Ukraine "within the sphere of prudence, of discretion, but we are not going to stop helping Ukraine for a single moment and work, as we always do, in close collaboration with all countries", she emphasised.
 
The four US destroyers housed at the Rota naval base (southern Spain), to which two more are to be added, are a fundamental part of the Atlantic Alliance's anti-missile system. Equipped with the AEGIS radar system, the four ships are the US contribution to NATO's missile defence architecture, which the alliance agreed to develop at the Lisbon Summit in November 2010 to protect European allies against potential threats from ballistic missile proliferation.
 
Rota, a naval base jointly used by Spain and the United States, has been participating in this ballistic missile defence programme since 2013. According to NATO, the German initiative will enable all participating nations to jointly develop an air defence system using interoperable, ready-to-use solutions. A "multinational and multifaceted" approach will offer a "flexible and scalable" way for countries to strengthen their deterrence and defence in an efficient and cost-effective manner, NATO said.