NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said that the Russian president has no plans to make peace.
Vladimir Putin has no immediate plans for peace in Ukraine, so the West must prepare to deliver lethal aid to Kiev for a long time to come, the NATO Secretary General warned in an interview with the Guardian. Jens Stoltenberg said the Russian president was engaged in a “war of attrition” and said he wanted NATO members to agree to spend 2% of GDP on defense as a minimum at the alliance’s next summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.
“Fierce fighting, currently centered around Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, shows that Russia is ready to just throw in thousands and thousands of soldiers, to take many sacrifices for minimal gains. President Putin is not planning peace, he is planning more war. Russia is increasing military industrial production and reaching out to authoritarian regimes like Iran or North Korea and others to try to acquire more weapons,” the NATO chief said.
NATO continues to help
As a result, the US, UK, France, Germany and other Western countries had to be ready to support Ukraine with weapons, ammunition and spare parts for a long time. “There will still be a need, because this is a war of attrition; it’s about the industrial capacity to sustain support“, said the Secretary General.
At this point, the fighting was so intense that Ukraine’s use of artillery shells – 4,000 to 7,000 a day to Russia’s 20,000 – outstripped Western production. “The current rate of ammunition consumption is higher than the current rate of production,” Stoltenberg said, although the new agreements meant that this was changing.
Earlier this week, EU members agreed to supply Ukraine with one million grenades, enough for six months or so. But heading into what is expected to be his last summit, Stoltenberg said he wanted NATO members to be prepared to spend more to reverse the Russian invasion.
NATO’s annual report, published on Tuesday, admits that only seven of its 30 member states – the US, UK, Poland, Greece and the Baltic states – have met the current defense spending target of 2% of GDP in 2022. France at 1.89% and Germany to 1.49% fell, although both committed to an increase. “At our summit in Vilnius in July, I expect the Allies to agree on a more ambitious pledge on new defense investments, with at least 2% of GDP to be invested in our defense,” Stoltenberg said at the time of the report’s release – a commitment that insider emphasized. that he expects all members to agree to it.
China not to give Russia weapons
Equally important, the head of NATO said, would be deter China from supplying arms to Russia, which also lacks key ammunition. China, whose leader, Xi Jinping, visited Moscow earlier this week, NATO members said there would be “consequences” if it delivered lethal aid to Moscow.
China’s serious effort to act as a mediator in the conflict must be accompanied by an attempt “to understand the perspectives of Ukraine”, said the head of NATO, and to “engage directly with President Zelensky”. But while he welcomed any peace initiative, he complained that Beijing had not yet condemned the Russian invasion.
Stoltenberg believed the West had provided enough military equipment, including tanks, combat vehicles and rocket artillery, “to enable the Ukrainians to regain territory to liberate more and more land” seized by Russia after the initial invasion in February 2022.
The goal, he emphasized, is to “enable the Ukrainians to launch an offensive and retake the territory“, although he said that NATO is not a party to the conflict, and the members of the alliance make decisions on the provision of weapons themselves and leave calculations on the battlefield to Ukrainian commanders. But the NATO chief did not rule out member states going further by sending F-16s or other Western aircraft to Ukraine, after its president Volodymyr Zelensky’s emotional plea in February to “wings for freedom.” This month, Poland and Slovakia agreed to provide 17 Soviet-standard MiG-29s, but the total number available is small.
“We should continue to address the need for more capabilities,” Stoltenberg said, noting that despite US President Joe Biden’s initial apparent refusal to release American-made fighters, “no decision has been made on the F-16s.”
Sweden in NATO
Progress on Sweden’s bid to join NATO is continuing, the alliance chief said, despite Turkey blocking its accession while allowing Finland to proceed. Sweden, in fact, was “at the NATO table”, he said, because it was invited to the last summit as a guest and received security guarantees from some members of the alliance.
The failure to include Sweden, which Stoltenberg invested a lot of time in, was not a personal failure, he said. Some limited progress had been made, he said, adding that NATO had managed to restart meetings and consultations with Ankara and Stockholm. After nearly nine years in the job, Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, said he would definitely leave in October, having completed his term.
(WORLD)