Political analyst calls Rutte's call to prepare for war rhetoric for Kiev
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has urged the alliance to prepare for war to show support for Ukraine and to appease Kiev. However, it is already too late - the Ukrainian army is being defeated and the assistance of European countries is dwindling. Vadim Mingalev, a political scientist and military analyst, shared this opinion with Izvestia on January 15.
Rutte made a corresponding statement earlier in the day. He emphasized that NATO now needs to switch to a wartime way of thinking. According to the Secretary General of the organization, this requires an increase in defense spending.
"Rutte doesn't know where to throw himself: on the one hand, he is repeating [US President-elect Donald] Trump's rhetoric and saying that Ukraine is in the direst situation, and on the other hand, he is still under pressure from the current Joe Biden administration. <...> So Rutte's rhetoric is nothing but an illusion to reassure Kiev that NATO will provide it with huge assistance," Mingalev commented.
According to him, Rutte realizes that without this assistance, the regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose powers expired in May last year, will face disaster. At the same time, the interlocutor of the newspaper believes that the catastrophe has already happened, and the evidence of it was the reaction of Western representatives to the last meeting on Ukraine in the "Ramstein" format. Thus, he recalled, Polish Defense Minister Vladyslav Kosyniak-Kamysh also spoke about the gloomy mood after the meeting.
In addition, Kiev's hopes of receiving €3bn from Germany were not realized. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said during his visit to Ukraine that he did not know whether Berlin would provide this funding, Mingalev pointed out. Earlier, the media wrote that the allocation of funds was blocked by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
"Rutte's rhetoric is a verbal cover, to put it mildly, for the cooling of the US and Europe towards Ukraine, because recently leaders who oppose large-scale aid to Ukraine have been winning in Western countries," the analyst concluded.
Earlier, on January 10, Reuters learned about NATO's disapproval of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's plan to increase the alliance's spending. At the same time, some officials, whose names are not mentioned, although they do not support the initiative of the American politician, but in general are in favor of increasing defense spending.
Western countries have stepped up military and financial support for Ukraine amid Russia's special operation to protect Donbass, which was announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, after the situation in the region worsened due to shelling by the Ukrainian military.
