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Leaders of NATO’s eastern flank countries will meet today in Romania for joint talks. The aim of the summit of the so-called Bucharest Nine (B9) is primarily to coordinate positions and interests ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara. The Czech Republic will be represented by President Petr Pavel, who traveled to Bucharest together with his Slovak counterpart Peter Pellegrini on Tuesday evening from Bratislava.

The B9 format was initiated by Romania and Poland in response to the deteriorating security situation in Ukraine after 2014. In addition to B9 members, representatives of the Nordic countries will also attend today’s summit in Bucharest. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are also expected to participate.

At today’s summit, leaders will discuss not only the security of NATO’s eastern flank, but also Europe’s growing role in ensuring security on the continent, Pavel told Czech journalists on Tuesday morning before departing from Prague.

Czechs are divided on whether President Petr Pavel should appeal to the Constitutional Court if the government of Andrej Babiš prevents him from attending major international events, suggests a poll conducted for the news site Novinky.cz by the NMS agency. Some 41 percent of respondents said they backed such legal action, while 42 percent said they were against it.

Mr. Pavel said last week that he was considering filing a jurisdictional action with the country’s highest court as Prime Minister Babiš and the foreign minister, Petr Macinka, have said he will not be part of the Czech delegation at a NATO conference in Turkey in July.

In the past presidents have usually represented the country at NATO summits.

Deputy Prime Minister Karel Havlíček says the Czech government will not increase this year’s budget deficit over the country’s defence commitments, Novinky.cz reported on Tuesday. Mr. Havlíček said the cabinet would instead seek out expenditures that could be classed as defence spending in projects already approved by the ministries of health, industry and, above all, transport. He did not rule out another possible approach: the placing of such projects directly beneath the Ministry of Defence.

Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said on Monday that the government would do everything it could to fulfil the state’s commitment, as a NATO member, to spending 2 percent of GDP on defence.

Czech president Petr Pavel and US officials criticised the government after the 2026 state budget set defence spending below 2 percent.

The 81st edition of the Prague Spring music festival gets underway at the Smetana Hall of the Czech capital’s Municipal House on Tuesday evening. The traditional curtain-raising composition, Bedřich Smetana’s My Country, will be performed by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra; it will be the 11th time the ensemble has opened Czechia’s most prestigious classical music event.

The Prague Spring festival will deliver a total of 41 concerts and is set to conclude on June 4.