NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg provided a shady explanation as to why the North Atlantic Alliance was continuing to ramp up its military spending even though the combined spending was already an estimated 20 times higher than that of Russia.
Russian President Putin announced that amid NATO’s plans to add an additional $100 billion in defense spending in 2020, Moscow could afford to actually make cuts in its defense budget.
According to Stoltenberg, the NATO alliance will continue to “invest as much as needed to make sure that we have credible war machine.
The NATO chief’s faulty remarks follow comments he made late last month, where he explained that although the alliance already spent over $1 trillion on defense in 2018, and was planning to spend an additional $100 billion in 2020.
Last month, in an interview with Middle Eastern media, Putin said that even though Russia was only spending $48 billion on defense, and ranked seventh in the world, Moscow enjoyed “unmatched military capabilities”.
Putin also emphasized in the interview that notwithstanding NATO’s spending and the US’s recent move to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Moscow would “not be dragged into exorbitant budget spending games” with the West.
Earlier this year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute think tank calculated NATO’s spending to have amounted to over $1 trillion in 2018, with seven of the alliance’s members listed among the top 15 spenders, and Russian spending estimated to amount to some $61.4 billion during the same period.
Sputnik / ABC Flash Point Military News 2019.
