The Mihail Kogalniceanu base will become NATO’s most important permanent military structure în Europe

The Mihail Kogalniceanu military base in Constanta county has entered an expansion process, with work on access roads and a high-capacity electrical network already started, according to a Digi24 report.   The new military base will cover an area of almost 3,000 hectares and will be the largest in Europe, larger than the Ramstein air base in Germany, which has an area of about 2,000 hectares. In addition to the military infrastructure, the Kogalniceanu base will include schools, kindergartens, shops and even a hospital, able to accommodate 10,000 NATO soldiers and their families.   “There will be social housing for individual personnel or families, there will be block-type housing, individual housing, nurseries, kindergartens, schools, pharmacies, everything that is needed,” declared the commander of the 57th Air Base Mihail Kogalniceanu, Nicolae Cretu.   Also, the base will have a new runway, parallel to the existing one, hangars, maintenance spaces, simulators, fuel and ammunition depots and, of course, air defense systems. For the construction of the military base, 2,400 hectares of land were expropriated from Mihail Kogalniceanu and Lumina. 5,500 euros were paid for each hectare.   Retired General Ben Hodges, former commander of American troops in Europe, praised Romania for starting the expansion of the Mihail Kogalniceanu military base in Constan?a, which will become the largest in Europe, following works estimated at around 2.5 billion USD. The base will be able to house up to 10,000 soldiers and their families and will basically be a small city.   “Very good news. The latest example of Romanian contributions to collective defense. MK has for years been an important hub in the Black Sea region for NATO Air Policing and for US logistics and training. MK Expansion is important for implementing Black Sea strategy,” reads Hodges’ post on X (former Twitter).   In his turn, Dorin Popescu, geopolitical analyst, told Euronews : “The Mihail Kogalniceanu base will become NATO’s most important permanent military structure in the immediate vicinity of the conflict in southern Ukraine. Let’s not imagine that this conflict will end this year in 2025, in 2026, it’s a long-term conflict.”