Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor will be one of the guests at a working dinner to be attended by US President Barack Obama and leaders of 11 NATO member-countries from Central and Eastern Europe in Prague on Thursday.
This will be the first meeting between the US president and a senior Croatian official after a year. In April 2009 President Obama met the then Croatian President Stjepan Mesic and the then Prime Minister Ivo Sanader at a NATO summit in Strasbourg, on the occasion of Croatia's admission to the alliance.
Kosor and the incumbent President Ivo Josipovic have not met with the US president yet.
Obama invited to the Prague meeting heads of state or government from the Czech Republic, Croatia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary and Romania.
By being invited to the meeting, Croatia has joined ten countries which were admitted to NATO in the period from 1999 to 2004 and which are regularly consulted on security in Europe.
The USA is particularly interested in Croatia's opinion on the security situation in the region, where the security architecture is still an outstanding issue.
Even though the general topic of the meeting will be European security, foreign media report that Obama called the meeting to dispel the fears of allies in the region over US efforts aimed at improving relations with Russia.
It is reported that Obama plans to tell them that the improvement of US-Russia relations will not be to the detriment of their political interests.
Obama arrives in Prague to sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
The new treaty will limit the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side, which is a 30-percent reduction in relation to the 1991 treaty START I.
