BRUSSELS: Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte warned on Thursday that a Russian victory over Ukraine would destroy the dissuasive power of the country’s biggest military empire and that its credibility was price trillions to recover.
Nato has been ramping up its troops along its eastern flank with Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, deploying thousands of troops and equipment to hinder Moscow from expanding its conflict into the place of any of the firm’s 32 member states.
” If Ukraine loses therefore to recover the punishment of the rest of Nato once, it will be a much, much higher rate than what we are contemplating at this moment in terms of ramping up our wasting and ramping up our business generation,” Rutte said.
” It will not be billion more; it will be billions more,” he said, on the outside of the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Rutte insisted that Ukraine’s eastern backers had” move away and never scale back the support” they are providing to the country, about three years after Russia’s full-fledged invasion began.
” We have to change the direction of the battle,” Rutte said, adding that the West” could help in the 21st century that one nation invades another country and tries to conquer it. “
” We are beyond those days,” he said.
Anxiety in Europe is mounting that US President Donald Trump might seek to quickly end the war in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on terms that are unfavorable to Ukraine, but Rutte appeared wary about trying to do things in a hurry.
” If we got a bad deal, it would only mean that we will see the president of Russia high-fiving with the leaders from North Korea, Iran and China and we cannot accept that,” the former Dutch prime minister said. ” That would be geopolitically a big, big mistake. “
Polish foreign mnister Radek Sikorski welcomed Trump’s acknowledgement that it must be Russia which should make the first peace moves, but he cautioned that” this is not the Putin that President Trump knew in his first term. “
On Wednesday, Trump threatened to impose stiff taxes, tariffs and sanctions on Moscow if an agreement isn’t reached to end the war, but that warning will probably fall on deaf ears in the Kremlin. Russia’s economy is already weighed down by a multitude of US and European sanctions.
Sikorksi warned that Putin should not be put at the center of the world stage over Ukraine.
” The president of the United States is the leader of the free world. Vladimir Putin is an outcast and an indicted war criminal for stealing Ukrainian children,” Sikorski said.
” I would suggest that Putin has to earn the summit, that if he gets it early, it elevates him beyond his, significance and gives him the wrong idea about the trajectory of this,” he said.
