EU: Russia Has Long-Term Assault Plan  06/18 06:31

   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 warned on Wednesday.

   BRUSSELS (AP) -- 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 warned on Wednesday.

   "Russia is already a direct threat to the European Union," EU foreign policy 
chief Kaja Kallas said. She listed a series of Russian airspace violations, 
provocative military exercises, and attacks on energy grids, pipelines and 
undersea cables.

   Kallas noted that Russia is already spending more on defense than the EU's 
27 nations combined, and this year will invest more "on defense 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 lawmakers 
in Strasbourg, France.

   "Europe is under attack and our continent sits in a world becoming more 
dangerous," she added.

   NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has said that Russia is producing as much 
weapons and ammunition in three months as the 32 allies together make in a 
year. He believes that 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 (BND), Bruno 
Kahl, warned against underestimating Russian intentions toward 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, according to German news agency dpa.

   Russia's goal is to expand its sphere of influence westward, the BND chief 
said.

   "They want to catapult NATO back to the state it was in at the end of the 
1990s. They want to kick America out of Europe, and they'll use any means to 
achieve that," Kahl said.

   He warned that "this must be nipped in the bud," and that deterrence is the 
"most bloodless way" to prevent war. NATO countries are set to agree a new 
defense investment pledge at a summit in the Netherlands next week, pouring 
billions of dollars more into security-related spending.