Today is the final day of the NATO summit here in Washington at the top of the agenda this week

sustaining and expanding support for Ukraine not on the official agenda concerns about about the US election, and its potential outcomes.

Earlier today, I spoke exclusively with Chancellor Olaf Schultz of Germany to discuss how

NATO leaders are preparing to tackle some of the biggest geopolitical challenges

facing the world, what he thinks about his counterpart, President Biden, and the prospect of a return

to power by Donald Trump. Chancellor Schutz, welcome to the news hour.

Thank you for being here.

Hello.

Let's begin with Ukraine, which is clearly top of the NATO summit agenda

while you're here.

You and others resisted language in the communique to extend

Ukraine and invitation to join NATO. Can you explain to us why that was? Are you

worried that that would send Russia a signal of some kind of escalation.

No, it's not about this.

We are supporting Ukraine.

As you know, Germany is the second biggest donor of also military support to Ukraine

after the United States, and we will continue to be strong in our

support for Ukraine and during the war no one expects Ukraine to enter NATO.

It is now that we do what we can say today and this is the language which we worked on in Vilnius which was the right way of saying that there is a path to NATO for Ukraine and it is irreversible as we say today

I think this is the right message. You know of course Russia's watching with

great interest the messages from the summit.

Dimitri Medvedev just tweeted this morning saying, commenting on this language

...