VILNIUS, July 12. /TASS/. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg opened the inaugural meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council on the sidelines of the alliance's summit in Vilnius on Wednesday.

The event is being attended by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

"Welcome to the first meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council. This is truly a historic moment: allies and Ukraine, sitting side by side as equals to address our common vision of Euro-Atlantic security," the NATO chief said in his opening statement.

"We need to keep up and further expand our support to help Ukraine liberate its land and deter future aggression," Stoltenberg added.

The meeting then continued behind closed doors.

Earlier, Stoltenberg held a joint press-conference with the Ukrainian president, where he said that no NATO members would be able to block the council’s meetings as had happened with the NATO-Ukraine Commission. Budapest had been blocking the commission’s meetings for several years because of Ukrainian laws infringing upon the rights of the country’s Hungarian ethnic minority.

Stoltenberg explained that the NATO-Ukraine Council would hold regular meetings at the level of heads of state, foreign and defense ministers, chiefs of general staff and ambassadors. In addition, special thematic working groups will be established. That said, the body will be exactly what the Russia-NATO Council, established in 2002, used to be. However, as tensions between Russia and NATO rose in August 2008, when Georgia unleashed a war against South Ossetia with the alliance’s political support, the US delegation blocked all attempts by the Russian permanent mission to NATO to convene an emergency meeting of the Russia-NATO Council. Instead, the North Atlantic Council held an emergency meeting, expressing solidarity with Georgia and demanding that Russia stop its operation to force Georgia to peace, which had in fact been successfully completed by that time.