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Russia could be ready to attack Nato within five years and leaders of the western alliance are expected to agree to increase military spending to 5% of GDP later this month to contain the threat, the alliance’s secretary general has said.
Mark Rutte said in a speech in London on Monday that Nato needed “a quantum leap in our collective defence”, which would include significant rearmament to deter an increasingly militarised Russia.
That would include a fivefold increase in air defence, thousands more tanks and millions more artillery shells to boost stockpiles and ensure Nato countries match existing levels of Russian production.
Speaking at Chatham House after meeting the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, Rutte said: “I expect allied leaders to agree to spend 5% of GDP on defence of which 3.5% of GDP will be core military spending, at a summit in The Hague later this month.”
“Danger will not disappear even when the war in Ukraine ends,” Rutte emphasised, reflecting a belief that the Kremlin will not demilitarise even it agrees to a ceasefire and eventually to peace with Kyiv.
The remarks provoked an immediate response from Moscow. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said that Nato “is demonstrating itself as an instrument of aggression and confrontation” with the emerging plan.
Western military planners believe Russia will seek to retain an active and experienced army of more than 600,000 personnel as well as maintaining defence spending of about 6.5% of the country’s GDP, and be able to threaten Nato’s eastern flank in less than half a decade.
On his trip to the UK, Rutte visited Sheffield Forgemasters, a nationalised steelmaker owned by the Ministry of Defence that makes complex components for nuclear submarines, before meeting Starmer and then giving his speech.
The former Dutch prime minister has been pushing a proposal for Nato members to agree to lift core defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by about 2035, along with a further 1.5% on cyber and other related military infrastructure.
Britain is expected to sign up to the plan, to be formally confirmed at the summit, as part of an effort to maintain the support of the US president, Donald Trump, who has pressed for the 5% target.
Rutte would not set a concrete date for achieving the target – demonstrating it was still a subject of negotiation among allies – though he initially proposed 2032. Other countries, including the UK, have indicated they expect to settle on 2035. “These discussions are ongoing,” Rutte said.
Justifying the need for extra spending, Rutte said Nato needed “a 400% increase in air and missile defence” as part of a wider rearmament to maintain credible deterrence and defence. “We see in Ukraine how Russia delivers terror from above, so we will strengthen the shield that protects our skies,” Rutte said.
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There will also have to be wider restocking of weapons, run down initially during the long period of post-cold war peace and then because so much has been donated to Ukraine to help it fend off the full-scale Russian invasion over the past three years.
“Our militaries also need thousands more armoured vehicles and tanks, millions more artillery shells, and we must double our enabling capabilities, such as logistics, supply, transportation and medical support,” Rutte said.
Britain has promised to increase defence spending from the current 2.33% of GDP to 2.5% by 2027 and to 3% in the early 2030s. But a week ago, Starmer acknowledged that discussions about Nato’s future military needs were also taking place. “There are discussions about what the contribution should be going into the Nato conference in two or three weeks’ time,” the prime minister said as he unveiled the UK’s strategic defence review, part of a wider conversation about “what sort of Nato will be capable of being as effective in the future”.
Russia said the threat was being exaggerated and that ordinary citizens would have to bear the cost. “European taxpayers will spend their money to defuse some threat that they say comes from our country, but it is nothing but an ephemeral threat,” Peskov said.
Rutte was expected to welcome the UK’s strategic defence review. The document said Britain faced “a new era of threat” and that in order to deter Russia the UK had to become, in the words of Starmer, “battle-ready”.
Last week, one of the three members of the defence review team, the foreign policy expert Fiona Hill, said the UK needed to recognise that Russia considered itself at war with Britain and that the US under Trump was no longer a reliable ally. “We’re in pretty big trouble,” Hill said in an interview with the Guardian.
