NATO chief Mark Rutte on Thursday warned that members of the military alliance must treat the threat posed by Moscow more urgently as they may be “Russia’s next target.”
In a stark warning, Rutte said in an address in Berlin that NATO’s 32 members need to step up defense effort to prevent a war with Russia that could be “on the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured.”
“We are Russia’s next target. And we are already in harm’s way,” Rutte said, noting Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years.
“I fear that too many are quietly complacent. Too many don’t feel the urgency. And too many believe the time is on our side. It is not. The time for action is now,” Rutte added as he called for allied defense spending and production to “rise rapidly” to ensure the alliance’s forces “have what they need to keep us safe.”
NATO has been on edge since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022 sparking the largest and bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.
The Kremlin claims NATO expansion as one of the reasons it launched the war, which has left an estimated 1 million casualties according to Rutte and other Western intelligence sources.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned European powers on December 2 that if they start a “war” with Russia, Moscow is ready to fight.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a roundtable of ambassadors in Moscow on December 11 that the Kremlin has no plans to strike out militarily at either the European Union or NATO and is “ready to set out the relevant guarantees in writing and in a legal document” stating as much “on a collective, mutual basis.”
