By Gwladys Fouche and Nora Buli
OSLO (Reuters) -Norway should boost financial aid to Ukraine and hike its own defence spending, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said on Thursday, declaring the country faced its most serious security situation for 80 years.
Norway, home to the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund with assets of $1.8 trillion, has seen soaring income from gas sales to Europe as a result of Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, and faces pressure at home and abroad to boost its aid.
Stoere’s move marks the latest example of a European country scrambling to boost defence spending and maintain support for Ukraine after President Donald Trump froze U.S. military aid to Kyiv and fuelled doubts about its commitment to European NATO allies.
The Nordic nation now faces “the most serious security situation for our country since World War II”, Stoere said in an address to parliament.
Parliament last year agreed to spend 35 billion crowns ($3.22 billion) on military and civilian support for Ukraine in 2025, increasing the total framework, dubbed the Nansen programme, to 155 billion crowns from 2023 to 2030.
In recent days Norwegian politicians have been debating how much more Oslo should support Ukraine, given the drop in U.S. support for Kyiv and the fact that Norway’s neighbours such as Sweden and Denmark have so far made bigger donations.
Stoere of the ruling Labour Party did not mention any numbers, but added political parties meeting later on Thursday should agree a significant rise in the programme this year to provide Ukraine with “the greatest possible fighting power”.
SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND
In the parliament’s upstairs gallery, a delegation of six Ukrainian lawmakers listened to the PM’s intervention.
One of them, Volodymyr Kabachenko from the opposition Batkivshchyna party, said he welcomed Norway’s move and said the country could do more, noting it was the only European nation that could finance aid with its own money rather than debt.
“If Norway wants to secure the lives of its own citizens … the only right thing to do is to provide Ukraine with money and we will be fighting on behalf of Ukraine, Europe and Norway,” Kabachenko told Reuters.
In 2023 alone, inflows to Norway’s wealth fund from oil and gas revenues swelled to 1.1 trillion crowns – or around $100 billion – nearly three times the previous record set in 2008.
Nansen is Norway’s cross-party, bilateral aid programme for Ukraine, named after Nobel Peace Prize laureate Fridtjof Nansen.
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche and Nora Buli, editing by Terje Solsvik, William Maclean)
