The NATO secretary general said this week’s summit in Madrid would agree to the alliance’s most important transformation in a generation, putting 300,000 troops in high readiness in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Jens Stoltenberg added that existing military alliance forces in the Baltic states and five other frontline countries would increase “up to brigade levels,” doubling or tripling to between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers.
That would mean “the biggest overhaul of our collective defense and deterrence since the Cold War,” Stoltenberg said ahead of the 30-country alliance meeting, which will run from Tuesday to Thursday this week.
The NATO Rapid Reaction Force currently has 40,000 people, but the proposed change calls for a broader overhaul in response to Russian militarization, which also includes bringing ammunition stocks and other supplies further east.
The Norwegian Secretary-General admitted that he could not make any promises about the progress of Sweden and Finland’s applications to join NATO, because the objections raised by Turkey to its accession remained unresolved.
Stoltenberg said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had agreed to meet with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and Finnish President Sauli Niinistö on Tuesday in Madrid to try to resolve the issue.
But he downplayed hopes of a breakthrough at the meeting on the sidelines of the NATO event. “It’s too early to say what kind of progress you can make at the summit,” he said at a news conference.
Turkey has said it will block requests from Sweden and Finland unless it receives satisfactory assurances that the Nordic countries are willing to address what it considers support for Kurdish groups it designates as terrorist organizations.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will also address the summit, where he is expected to follow a request made Monday at the G7 meeting in Germany for Western countries to provide weapons so that the war does not “drag on during the ‘winter’.
Stoltenberg said NATO would agree to a “comprehensive and enhanced assistance package” for Kyiv, including immediate assistance to “secure communications, drone and fuel systems” and long-term assistance in the arms transition and Soviet standard equipment to its Western equivalents.
But while the state of war, now in its fifth month, is likely to dominate the summit, NATO itself will only offer limited direct support because its members do not want to enter into a full-fledged war with Russia. The supply of arms is made by the member states.
NATO maintains eight battle groups in Eastern Europe, with the aim of acting as the first initial defense in the event of a Russian invasion. Four are in the Baltic states and Poland and were complemented by the creation of four more in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia after the attack on Ukraine.
Germany said earlier this month that it would provide a brigade of troops to defend Lithuania, where the country leads a 1,000-member battle group, although it turned out that most of the additional 3,500 that Berlin intends to provide will be based on its own soil, prepared. to move further east quickly if necessary.
Stoltenberg said he hoped other NATO members would make similar announcements to defend the countries for which they are responsible. The number of additional troops would be made up of “forces pre-assigned to their country of origin” that would regularly exercise in the countries to which they had been linked, he added.
Britain contributes some 1,700 troops to a leading multinational battle group in Estonia. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said almost a fortnight ago that it was very likely that the UK would allocate hundreds more troops in support of Estonia.
But Stoltenberg said there would not be a single model, suggesting that not all battle groups would increase to the size of a full brigade. Canada leads the combat group in Latvia, where it contributes 700 soldiers out of a total of about 1,000, while the US is responsible for Poland.