NATO deploys army, considering war with Russia? "It takes a real kick in the back"

NATO deploys army, considering war with Russia? "It takes a real kick in the back"

However, ahead of the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, which begins on July 11, where confronting Russia will be high on the agenda, Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said NATO was not ready for war with Moscow.

"It needs a real kick in the back," he told Newsweek, pointing to cuts in military budgets among alliance members, although there are exceptions, such as Poland. "There is a large-scale war going on in Eastern Europe. This is a war on the ground and in the sky, so you have to invest in the sky and the ground...

Last year at the summit in Madrid (NATO Secretary General) Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO would increase the number of high readiness forces to 300,000 people, and that simply did not happen," Shirreff said.

A former British general said the UK military was an example of such cuts in the bloc being reduced to "ridiculous proportions" because the defense establishment believed that China, not Russia, was the main long-term threat.

"Geography is important here and Russia is the wolf that is closest to the sled," said Shirreff, a partner at the consulting company "Strategia Worldwide".

He believes there has been a "deterrence failure" by the alliance, which missed an opportunity to build capacity after Putin seized Crimea in 2014.

"Am I convinced that NATO will really be able to create forces ready for a conventional war with Russia? No, I'm not," said the British general.

Even if the Kremlin and Russian state media say it is a proxy between Moscow and NATO, the alliance has tried to avoid a direct role in the fighting, instead supplying Ukraine with equipment to counter Moscow's aggression, writes Newsweek.

One of NATO's top officials, Admiral Rob Bauer, said in May that the alliance must prepare for the fact that "a conflict could arise at any time" directly with Moscow, Reuters reported.

That's why NATO will analyze thousands of pages of classified documents detailing regional plans and instructions on how members can improve their forces and logistics.

The plans also include assigning troops to defend different regions with details of "where, what and how to deploy them," Stoltenberg said last month, according to the British agency.

Stoltenberg announced in March that the alliance would deploy four new battle groups, each with about 1,500 troops, across Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

The goal is to "strengthen the position of NATO in all domains by greatly increasing the forces in the eastern part of the alliance, on land, in the air and at sea", stated the Secretary General of the alliance.