According to Mark Rutte, Vladimir Putin wants to expand the war in Ukraine to alliance countries. “Hostility is real and it’s increasing,” he said.
(DW) The Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Mark Rutte, said on Thursday (12/12) that Russian President Vladimir Putin may take the Russian military campaign in Ukraine to other parts of Europe and called on the countries that make up the alliance to increase their defense spending.
“Russia is preparing for a long-term conflict. With Ukraine and with us,” Rutte told a group of security experts at an event hosted by the think thank Carnegie Europe in Brussels. “How many new alerts do we need? We should be deeply concerned. I certainly am,” he added, calling for countries to take on a ‘war mentality’.
“What is happening in Ukraine can happen here too […]. It’s time to change to a war mentality, and to turbocharge our production and defense spending,” he warned.
“We’re not ready”
The Secretary General argued that Europe is not prepared for what could happen in the next five years. He believes that the military threat is not imminent for NATO only because the alliance has been structured over time, but argued that Russia’s “hostile actions” against the group’s countries “are real and are increasing”.
He cited “cyber attacks on both sides of the Atlantic, assassination attempts on British and German soil and explosions at an ammunition warehouse in the Czech Republic” as examples of a coordinated campaign to destabilize Europe.
“The danger is moving towards us at full speed,” Rutte continued. For him, the Russian military campaign against Georgia in 2008, and against Ukraine, are examples that Putin may want to take his “swarm of drones” into the territory of the alliance countries.
Cold war
Criticizing NATO’s military spending, Rutte said that the Russian threat to European security is as great as the one the continent faced in the Cold War.
“During the Cold War, Europeans spent much more than 3% of their GDP on defense. With that mentality, we won the Cold War. Spending fell after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The world was safer. Now it’s not.”
In addition to the threat posed by Russia, Rutte also pointed out that China “is substantially increasing its forces, including its nuclear weapons” and therefore insisted that NATO is not at war, but neither is it at peace.