Slovakia says it and six other countries would become NATO members at a ceremony on April 2 in Brussels

Slovakia says it and six other countries would become NATO members at a ceremony on April 2 in Brussels, months before a summit originally planned to welcome them in June. "There will probably be a ceremony in Brussels on the level of foreign ministers in April... but we are still not sure what the official ceremony will be like," said Slovak Foreign Ministry spokesman Juraj Tomaga. Mr Tomaga says there would probably be another celebration to mark the landmark enlargement sometime later. Ex-communist states Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria were initially expected to join NATO at a flag-raising ceremony in Istanbul at the end of June. Their admission will take the defence alliance from 19 to 26 members. NATO's first wave of eastward expansion came in 1999 when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined. This enlargement will extend the 54-year-old alliance's land-link to its furthest eastern member Turkey. NATO's most influential member, the United States, is expected to shift military bases from western Europe to the former eastern bloc and sharply reduce its 70,000 troops in Germany, a legacy of the Cold War.