NATO boosting its defenses

Source:AFP Published: 2015-6-18 23:18:02

Implementing biggest reinforcement since the Cold War


NATO head Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday the alliance was implementing its biggest defense reinforcement since the Cold War, as the region grapples with terrorism and an increasingly assertive Russia.

He spoke a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would add more than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal this year.

"NATO is facing a new security environment, both caused by violence, turmoil, instability in the south - ISIL in Iraq, Syria, North Africa - but also caused by the behavior of a more assertive Russia, which has used force to change borders, to annex Crimea and to destabilize eastern Ukraine," Stoltenberg told reporters, using another acronym to refer to the jihadist Islamic State group.

"And therefore NATO has to respond. We are responding, and we are doing so by implementing the biggest reinforcement of our collective defenses since the end of the Cold War and the Spearhead force is a key element of this reinforcement, and it's great to see that it's functional, and that it's exercising here in Poland," he said.

He spoke in Zagan in western Poland while attending the first full exercise of NATO's new rapid reaction force, created to deter Russia from any action against nervous Eastern European allies that were once ruled from Moscow.

Around 2,100 soldiers from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the United States have been taking part in the NATO exercise since last week.

The drill is designed to test NATO's Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, established in the wake of the alliance's September 2014 summit in Wales, which focused on reinforcing the alliance's eastern flank amid jitters over Russia.

On Wednesday, EU member states agreed to extend damaging economic sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis by another six months to the end of January 2016.

The agreement by ambassadors from the 28 European Union nations meeting in Brussels will be formalized by foreign ministers from the bloc when they meet next week, officials said. "EU foreign ministers will finalize the decision in Luxembourg on Monday," Poland's permanent representative to the EU said on Twitter, while several sources also confirmed the agreement.

The EU imposed its sanctions targeting Russia's banks, oil and defense sectors after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine in July 2014.

The United States has also imposed economic sanctions on Russia.

The sanctions extension will keep relations between Russia and the West in the deep freeze, a year and a half after the start of the Ukraine crisis.



Posted in: Europe

blog comments powered by Disqus