More soldiers, more heavy vehicles (tanks and armored vehicles), more artillery, more aircraft and more ships with NATO insignia on the border with Russia, with Italy, which is therefore being asked to allocate more resources to the Atlantic Alliance of which it is a part to provide a founding country. NATO said it was ready to permanently deploy more forces in an area of Europe that had been gradually neglected until 2014, when Russia’s armed annexation of Crimea revealed the beginning of Putin’s new strategies, culminating in invading Ukraine. In this scenario, NATO wants to counteract future aggression by Russia. Here’s the SecretaryGeneral: “NATO is in the midst of a fundamental transformation” that reflects “the longterm consequences” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions, said Jens Stoltenberg, after which “what we are now facing is a new reality, a new one Normality for European security ». Military commanders were therefore asked to offer options “for a longterm adjustment of NATO”.
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An expected and functional declaration of the need to buy time on a crucial issue: to welcome Ukraine among NATO countries, as Kyiv has long been demanding, and to show goodwill by most recently last December NATO troops and trainers hosted on their territory? A request that Putin cites among the causes that sparked the invasion special operation.
Currently, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Otan or NATO) is an intergovernmental military alliance between 27 European countries, two North American (USA and Canada) and one Eurasian (Turkey). The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, on the eve of the start of the Cold War.
The big voice, of course, is always that of the United States, which spends far more than all other countries combined: almost $690 billion, or almost 4% of their GDP, while almost all other educated are below the 2% threshold. Italy is in fifth place with 23 billion (1.1 of GDP). The US has always required all other countries to reach at least 2% of GDP.
Secretary General Stoltenberg has now announced via Twitter that he has spoken “with the President” of the EU Commission Ursula “von der Leyen” about his recent visit to Kyiv and the meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj. “We are determined to further increase our support for Ukraine. NATO and the EU are united and stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, he added. A legitimate intervention because the North Atlantic Treaty allows states “to resist an armed attack by acting together if, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of either party is threatened”.
The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 made these threats very concrete, and in 2016 in Warsaw, NATO decided to restructure its deployment, creating four combat groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. These groups were joined by the multinational South East Division, headquartered in Romania and led by Allied Joint Force Command from the Lago Patria base in Naples.
In practice, almost 5,000 wellequipped and welltrained soldiers from at least 20 Atlantic Alliance countries, regularly conducting exercises with host nations’ armies.
Italy in particular contributes its own troops to the tactical group Battlegroup in Latvia, based in Adazi and with a staff of over 1,500 soldiers: command is entrusted to Canada, which provides the largest number of men, followed by Spain and Italy. For more than 4 years, around 200 infantrymen have alternated with the GreenWhiteReds, who can also count on Centauro armored vehicles.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine forced NATO to review these numbers, which had a knockon effect for all nations involved. Meanwhile, Italy has doubled the number of Eurofighter or F35 aircraft already deployed alternately in Romania and the Baltic States to control the skies from 4 to 8. Then almost 1,400 elite soldiers (Comsubin, laguranri and para raiders) will be available for NATO bases in Hungary and Romania. And there is a willingness to at least double those numbers if the needs of the Alliance so require.
Paolo Ricci Bitti