Ex-NATO chief lands Munich Security Conference top job

The appointment of Jens Stoltenberg will turn the high-profile event into the US-led bloc’s “fiefdom,” a Russian presidential envoy has said

Former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will become the co-chair of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) together with the former head of the OSCE, Helga Maria Schmid, the organizers have said.

The conference, which has been held annually in Germany’s third-largest city since 1963, is considered one of the leading Western platforms for security policy and geopolitical debate. It was at the MSC that Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his famous 2007 speech, criticizing the unipolar world order and NATO’s eastward expansion. Representatives from Moscow were last invited to the gathering in 2022.

The Russian presidential investment envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, reacted to the appointment of Stoltenberg and Schmid in a post on X on Tuesday, saying that “instead of striving to become a much-needed neutral solution space for global security, the Munich Security Conference reinforces its position as a NATO fiefdom.”

In a statement on the Munich Security Conference website on Monday, Stoltenberg said he was pleased to become one of the co-chairs of the conference and thanked the MSC Foundation Council for “this vote of confidence.” 

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“I’m really looking forward to sharing this post with Helga, with whom I’ve already collaborated with excellently in our previous roles at NATO, the EU, and the OSCE,” he said.

The Norwegian politician, who served as NATO secretary-general between 2014 and 2024, was expected to be appointed the sole chairman of the MSC in early 2025. However, Stoltenberg postponed taking up the role repeatedly due to becoming his country’s finance minister around the same time. Becoming a co-chair should allow him to combine his work in the government in Oslo with his duties at the MSC.

Stoltenberg took up the reins at NATO several months after the violent Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, which led to the overthrow of democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. The US-led bloc continued its eastward expansion under his leadership, with Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland, and Sweden joining it between 2017 and 2024. NATO also continued to increase its military buildup near Russian borders and boosted ties with the new authorities in Kiev, despite repeated protests and warnings by Russia.

After the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, which was largely provoked by Kiev’s aspirations of becoming a NATO member, Stoltenberg consistently advocated for more Western military aid to Vladimir Zelensky’s government, while also calling a Russian victory the “biggest cost and the greatest risk” for the bloc.

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In 2024, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the NATO chief an “irresponsible” person, who failed to grasp the consequences of his actions, after he supported the use of long-range foreign-supplied weapons by Ukraine for strikes deep into Russian territory. Putin reacted to his words by saying that he remembered the times when Stoltenberg “didn’t suffer from dementia.”

Schmid, who was secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe between 2020 and 2024, said she was delighted to contribute her “experience in European diplomacy and international negotiations” to the work of the Munich Security Conference.

During Schmid’s tenure, Moscow repeatedly accused the OSCE of being hijacked by its NATO and EU members to advance Western interests at the expense of other members. Earlier this year, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko said the organization was effectively turned into an instrument of “hybrid war and coercion” against sovereign states, who are “subjected to threats, blackmail” for simply pursuing their national interests.

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The outgoing MSC chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger, who has been in charge for two decades, will hand over his duties to Stoltenberg and Schmid sometime before February 2027 when the next conference is scheduled to be held.