BRUSSELS — Russia poses a direct threat to the European Union through acts of sabotage and cyberattacks, but its massive military spending suggests that President Vladimir Putin also plans to use his armed forces elsewhere in the future, the EU’s top diplomat warned on Wednesday.
“Russia is already a direct threat to the European Union,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said. She listed a series of Russian airspace violations, provocative military exercises, and attacks on energy grids, pipelines and undersea cables.
Kallas noted that Russia is already spending more on defense than the EU’s 27 nations combined, and this year will invest more “on defense than its own health care, education and social policy combined.”
“This is a long-term plan for a long-term aggression. You don’t spend that much on (the) military, if you do not plan to use it,” Kallas told EU lawmakers in Strasbourg, France.
“Europe is under attack and our continent sits in a world becoming more dangerous,” she added.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has said that Russia is producing as much weapons and ammunition in three months as the 32 allies together make in a year. He believes that Russia could be in a position to launch an attack on a NATO ally by the end of the decade.
The acts of sabotage and cyberattacks are mostly aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine, military officers and experts have said.
But concern is mounting in Europe that Russia could try to test NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee — the pledge that an attack on any one of the allies would be met with a collective response from all 32.
In 2021, NATO allies acknowledged that significant and cumulative cyberattacks might, in certain circumstances, also be considered an armed attack that could lead them to invoke Article 5, but so far no action has been taken.
With the Trump administration now turning its sights on security challenges in the Middle East and China, Europe has been left to fend for itself, and for Ukraine, and finds itself in a more precarious position.
Last week, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service (BND), Bruno Kahl, warned against underestimating Russian intentions toward the West and NATO.
“We are very certain, and we have intelligence evidence for this, that Ukraine is just a step on the path to the West,” Kahl told the Table Today podcast on June 9, according to German news agency dpa.
Russia’s goal is to expand its sphere of influence westward, the BND chief said.
“They want to catapult NATO back to the state it was in at the end of the 1990s. They want to kick America out of Europe, and they’ll use any means to achieve that,” Kahl said.
He warned that “this must be nipped in the bud,” and that deterrence is the “most bloodless way” to prevent war. NATO countries are set to agree a new defense investment pledge at a summit in the Netherlands next week, pouring billions of dollars more into security-related spending.
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Kirsten Grieshaber contributed to this report from Berlin.
