“Europe is under attack and our continent sits in a world becoming more dangerous,” the EU’s top diplomat warned MEPs in Strasbourg yesterday, citing the “direct threat” posed to the European Union by Russia’s use of sabotage and cyberattacks, but also warning that Moscow’s huge military expenditures are a sign that President Vladimir Putin has plans to deploy his armed forces elsewhere in the future.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas pointed to Russian airspace violations, provocative military exercises, and attacks on energy grids, pipelines and undersea cables, while noting that Moscow already spends more on defence than all 27 EU member nations combined. This year, she stressed, Russia will invest more on defence than on “its own health care, education and social policy combined.”
Describing Moscow’s approach as “a long-term plan for a long-term aggression”, Kallas pointedly cautioned EU parliamentarians meeting in Strasbourg that “you don’t spend that much on (the) military, if you do not plan to use it.”
According to NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, in a three-month period, Russia produces as much weapons and ammunition as all 32 allies make together in a year. He contends that Russia could be in a position to launch an attack on a NATO ally by the end of the decade.
Military and expert analysts maintain that ongoing acts of sabotage and cyberattacks are primarily aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine. However, concern is mounting in Europe that Russia might attempt to test the security guarantee enshrined in NATO’s Article 5 — that an attack on any one of the allies would be met with a collective response from all 32 NATO members. In 2021, NATO allies concluded that significant and cumulative cyberattacks could, in specific circumstances, be considered an armed attack that would justify invoking provisions of Article 5. To date, no such action has been taken.
Last week, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service (BND), Bruno Kahl, warned that Moscow’s goal is “to catapult NATO back to the state it was in at the end of the 1990s”, declaring Russian wants “to kick America out of Europe, and they’ll use any means to achieve that.” “We are very certain, and we have intelligence evidence for this, that Ukraine is just a step on the path to the West,“ he said. Kahl, who was talking on the Table Today podcast according to German news agency dpa, declared deterrence to be the “most bloodless way“ to prevent war.
NATO members meet in summit in the Netherlands next week to affirm a new defence investment pact that will pour billions of dollars more into security-related spending.
