NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged the member countries of the alliance to prepare for the fact that it will take a long time to help Ukraine.

“We have to be realistic and realize that this may last for a long time, for many months, for even years,” he said, referring to a war.

According to him, now the paramount task of NATO is to help Ukraine.

"Well, NATO has two tasks when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine. The first is to support Ukraine. And I am so impressed by the courage of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian armed forces and the Ukrainian political leadership.

And we all have a responsibility to support them in their fight, to help them to uphold the right for self-defence.

And actually, NATO Allies have supported Ukraine for many years, since 2014, helped to train thousands of Ukrainian troops and especially the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and also Turkey has provided also critical equipment. And after the invasion, all the NATO Allies stepped up and many other partners also started to provide support. That’s our first responsibility, is to support Ukraine, because this matters also for our security," he noted.

But the second responsibility is to protect all NATO Allies, Stoltenberg said.

"So it is important to prevent this conflict from escalating to a full-scale war between Russia and NATO. Then we will see even more death, more destruction, more damage than what we see today in Ukraine.

So this dual task of support, but not do anything that can escalate the conflict, is the challenge for NATO. And we do that partly by making it clear that we support Ukraine, but NATO will not be part of the conflict, we’ll not send NATO troops into Ukraine," he added.