Russia and China a security threat. Strategic documents await change – News

The senior director of the defense policy and strategy section of the Ministry of Defense, Jan Jireš, told the iRozhlas.cz server that he is in charge of creating documents for his department.

Officials from the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs are working on the documents that define the Czech positions, ambitions and plans in security and defense policy. These are the Security Strategy and the Defense Strategy, the currently valid versions of which are outdated due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Both documents will explicitly state the perpetrators of the greatest threats. In addition to terrorism, Russia and China will be there,” said Jireš.

The Security Strategy dates from 2015, the Defense Strategy from 2017. They are followed by other documents, namely the Long-Term Outlook for Defense and the Construction Concept of the Army of the Czech Republic. In the previous versions of the strategic documents, there are non-specific references to “some states that seek to revise the existing international order”, or the Russian Federation, which “openly realizes its ambitions for power in the East of Europe, including through the use of military force”. There is no direct designation of Russia as a security threat to the Czech Republic in the documents yet.

“It’s a shift in the Czech environment. On the other hand, it is not surprising, because the new strategic concept of NATO is explicit with regard to the originators of the main security threats,” Jireš pointed out. The Czech Republic, as a member state of the North Atlantic Alliance, agreed to the new strategic concept of NATO last June at the summit in Madrid. “Now we will only turn it into national strategic documents in the field of defense and security,” added Jireš.

In the new strategic concept, NATO describes Russia as “the most significant and most direct threat to the Alliance’s security, peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic region”. The alliance also states that it can no longer consider Russia a partner. China is mentioned for the first time in NATO’s strategic concept, according to the document it represents a “challenge to alliance interests, security and values”.