Nato countries’ pledge to spend 5% of their economic output on defence is Donald Trump’s “biggest foreign policy success,” the alliance’s chief has said.
In an interview with the BBC, Mark Rutte said it was thanks to Donald Trump that Nato was “stronger than it ever was”, adding that Trump “is good news for collective defence, for Nato and for Ukraine”.
The US leader has harshly criticised European allies for spending very little on defence – even threatening to withdraw US protection if they fail to do so.
The Nato chief has warned that Russia could attack allies within the next five years. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin dismissed such talk as “hysteria” on Wednesday.
I’ve said it repeatedly – it’s a lie, nonsense, pure nonsense, about some imaginary Russian threat to European countries,” Putin told defence officials in Moscow.
After Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Russia had already annexed Crimea in 2014.
It now occupies most of Luhansk, and is understood to demand Ukraine’s withdrawal from all of Donetsk, too, even though Ukraine still controls up to 23% of the eastern region.
Putin said the goals of what he calls “the special military operation” would be achieved.
He said he preferred to do it through diplomacy, before warning that, “if the opposing side and their foreign patrons refuse to engage in substantive discussions, Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means”.
In his interview with the BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, the Nato secretary general said it was “insane” that Putin’s pursuit of his “historical idea that you want to regain access to Ukraine” – or over the entire territory that used to constitute the former Soviet Union – had caused the death or serious injury to 1.1m of his people.
