From March 1 to 5 Lviv’s Ivan Franko National University hosted the NATO Winter Academy, Euro-Atlantic Integration: an Instrument for Stability. The event was initiated by Lviv University, supported by the NATO Information and Documentation Center, Ministry of Education and Science, and the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. Participants of the conference were 55 students from Belarus, Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. In the process of their study they researched topical problems and contemporary aspects of international cooperation and security, setting out their ideas in their very interesting papers. The conference was attended also by representatives of NATO, OSCE, the Presidential Administration, Verkhovna Rada, NSDC, and the Defense Ministry of Ukraine, along with noted scholars from Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, and Ukraine. Obviously, all are interested in the ideas of the young, striving to train decent successors. It is also important that this international cooperation took on special significance.
The academy’s meetings discussed general security problems, NATO’s functioning after the Prague and Istanbul summits, NATO’s prospects in the twenty-first century within the context of Euro-Atlantic integration, and also Ukraine’s place and role in this process. The winter academy, which is, incidentally, the second in NATO’s history, was held in a quite democratic climate. During the debates the students tried to cover all the pros and cons of Ukraine’s integration into the European community. Significantly, all of them delivered their papers in English. The best will be rewarded with a trip to NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
The evidence of the academy organizers’ serious approach is the fact that OSCE Secretary General Jan Kubis primarily planned to visit Kyiv, but, having received the invitation to the NATO winter academy, he decided to come to Lviv first. In his keynote speech, the OSCE Secretary General stated that at the conference the students concentrated on the problems that play an important role for Europe and the world: terrorism, organized crime, human trafficking, etc, which they might have to face in real life in a few years.
Incidentally, OSCE Secretary General Kubis was able to initiate negotiations, which were the goal of his visit to Ukraine, already in Lviv, since Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kostiantyn Hryshchenko also came to the academy’s opening ceremony.
