The suggestion that Russia could attack a NATO member state in the next few years is unreasonable, the secretary general of the military bloc, Jens Stoltenberg, has claimed. He was speaking during a joint press conference with Finnish President Alexander Stubb on Thursday.
The two officials were asked to comment on claims made by a number of high-ranking military commanders from countries such as Norway and the Baltic States, that Russia intends to launch an assault on a NATO member state within the next two or three years.
Stoltenberg said the bloc does not see any “imminent military threat” to any of its nations, noting that Russia was “more than preoccupied with the war in Ukraine.”
He claimed that Russia had already moved some of its forces from the vicinity of Finland and other Nordic countries down to Ukraine, and argued that even when the fighting ends in Ukraine, it would still take Moscow some time to rebuild its strength.
Even when it does, Stoltenberg argued that it is unreasonable to assume that Russia would launch an assault on the bloc “because NATO is 50% of the world’s military might. NATO is the strongest alliance, military power in the world.”
“This idea that there is a kind of a countdown to the next war is wrong. We are there to prevent that from happening,” he said.
Stubb agreed and said he would like to “mitigate the rhetoric that we quite often see in today’s world.” He said that deviating from its current military campaign in Ukraine to attack a NATO member state would be too costly for Russia.
“The whole idea that a country like Russia would somehow attack or intimidate the biggest military alliance in the world, I simply find rather implausible,” the Finnish president said, adding that, with all its operational plannings “based on realities,” the bloc does not see such a scenario “in the cards.”
Earlier, speaking to the heads of major international news agencies on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Russian President Vladimir Putin also dismissed claims that Moscow was preparing an attack on NATO.
The Russian president described the idea as “bulls**t,” suggesting that those peddling the theory had gone “completely insane” and were “thick as a plank.” He argued that such rhetoric is solely intended to maintain the West’s global hegemony through fear and be used as an excuse to procure more weapons and send them to Ukraine.