KIEV, November 9. /TASS/. Speaker of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (national parliament) Olexander Turchynov said on Sunday Rada’s key task is to build a Europe’s strongest army in Ukraine.

“We have no alternative to European and Euro-Atlantic integration,” his press service quoted him as saying in an interview with the TSN television channel. He stressed that a key task for the parliament was to create “a Europe’s strongest defence sector and a Europe’s stringest army.”

The first step towards this goal, in his words, was to retract from Ukraine’s off-bloc status.

While taking part in the discussion of the presidential programme of reforms Strategy-2020 in September 2014, Dmitry Shinkiv, a deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s administration, said that Ukraine was to become a “military state” by 2020, with defence spending being increased from the current one percent of GDP to five precent.