EU's top diplomat warns of long-term Russian aggression

Perth Now

4 hours ago

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 warns.
"Russia is already a direct threat to the European Union," EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Wednesday, listing a series of Russian airspace violations, provocative military exercises and attacks on energy grids, pipelines and undersea cables.
Kallas noted that Russia was already spending more on defence than the EU's 27 nations combined, and in 2025 would invest more "on defence 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 MPs in Strasbourg, France.
"Europe is under attack and our continent sits in a world becoming more dangerous."
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has said Russia is producing as much weapons and ammunition in three months as the 32 allies together make in a year.
He believes 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, Bruno Kahl, warned against underestimating Russian intentions towards 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.