NEW YORK, July 5. /TASS/. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that Russia produces several times more ammunition in three months than all NATO member-states in a year.
"We have an enormous geopolitical challenge on our hands. And that is first of all Russia, which is reconstituting itself at a pace and a speed which is unparalleled in recent history. They are now producing three times as much ammunition in three months as the whole of NATO is doing in a year," he said in an interview with The New York Times.
Rutte claims that the agreement reached at the summit of the North Atlantic Alliance leaders in The Hague to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 is necessary to guarantee NATO countries security, including from Russia.
"So, yes, this is an enormous amount of spending. But if we don’t, we’ll have to learn Russian," he said.
The idea of Russia's alleged intention to attack NATO countries has been constantly repeated in recent months by the heads of the alliance and the EU structures. Neither the organization's Secretary General nor the head of the European Commission explain why Moscow would do this. In the summer of 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a meeting organized by TASS with the heads of world news agencies on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, stated that the West's collective assertions about Russia's readiness to attack NATO countries was nonsense.