BRUSSELS, October 8. /TASS/. NATO is not planning direct military assistance to Ukraine, its Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said on Wednesday after a meeting with NATO’s new Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

“The Alliance is not planning to provide direct military assistance. We are talking about military-technical assistance from both NATO and its individual member states." Several projects for increasing the capability of Ukraine’s army, financed from four NATO trust funds, will start implementing shortly, Klimkin told TASS. “The idea is to make these trust funds to facilitate the reform of Ukrainian armed forces and the defense sector,” he explained.

Talks were also focused on the compatibility of Ukraine’s armed forces with the armies of the Alliance’s countries. “We discussed how to work on the basis of the NATO summit and the Ukraine-NATO summit in Newport, how to use the existing practical possibilities, how to effectively use the possibilities of trust funds, how to ensure mutual compatibility of Ukraine’s armed forces with the NATO armies and how we will prepare a special roadmap for this,” Klimkin said.

He said his meeting with Stoltenberg had also touched upon the situation in the conflict-torn Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. “He (the NATO Secretary General) fully agreed with me and supported Ukraine on the need for sustainable ceasefire, effective control on the Ukrainian-Russian border, and progress on the issue of refugees. There are still up to 600 captives,” Klimkin said. NATO's top diplomat also noted the need for organizing true elections in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in accordance with Ukrainian legislation and reaffirmed the Alliance’s determination to provide “political support in stabilizing the situation in Donetsk and Luhansk and the whole political process”.