NATO's Partnership Training and Education Centres community will support Ukraine in its military education needs, including on cyber defence, energy security, demining and English language training. This was agreed at the 22nd Annual Partnership Training and Education Centres (PTECs) Conference of Commandants, which took place in Bogota, Colombia.
Several sessions of the meeting were dedicated to the support that the PTEC community can provide to Ukraine in the medium to long term. PTEC Commandants received detailed briefings on Ukraine's priorities from representatives of the NATO Liaison Office to Ukraine, and from Ukrainian national defence institutions, including the National Academy of the National Guard of Ukraine, and the Bohdan Khmelnytskyi National Academy of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine. The Commandant of the Ukrainian PTEC, the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre (IPSC), also presented the Centre's future ambitions. The IPSC, which was bombed by Russia in March 2022, is continuing its work, and aims to receive NATO accreditation.
PTEC representatives also exchanged ideas on how to foster even more the community's involvement in NATO's practical security and defence cooperation. They reaffirmed their readiness to be further involved in the implementation of key NATO capacity building programmes, including the Defence Capacity Building packages for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan, Mauritania, Moldova, and Tunisia.
This year's PTEC Conference of Commandants provided a unique platform to discuss the PTEC community's contributions to NATO's defence capacity building agenda, and to identify areas of practical military cooperation as described in the North Atlantic Council's PTEC concept. The conference was co-chaired by the Headquarters Supreme Allied Command Transformation (HQ SACT) and the NATO School Oberammergau (NSO).
The conference was hosted by the Colombian PTEC - the Colombian International Demining Centre (CIDES). The event was an opportunity for the CIDES to highlight its education and training achievements in the fields of operational and humanitarian demining.
