The Military Committee chairman of NATO warned of the possibility of a regional war with Russia in the coming decades in comments to military leaders during a NATO meeting in Brussels on Thursday.
“We have to realize it’s not a given that we are in peace. And that’s why we [NATO] are preparing for a conflict with Russia,” Admiral Rob Bauer said. “But the discussion is much wider. It is also the industrial base and also the people that have to understand they play a role.”
“It starts there,” the four-star Dutch admiral added. “The realization that not everything is planable and not everything is going to be hunky dory in the next 20 years.”
During Bauer’s opening remarks on Wednesday, he warned that NATO is facing “the most dangerous world in decades.”
“The tectonic plates of power are shifting,” he said, as “NATO has entered into a new era of collective defence.”
German defense minister Boris Pistorius underscored that a Russian attack on a NATO member state could come within the next decade in comments to the press Friday morning.
“Our experts expect a period of five to eight years in which this could be possible,” Pistorius told Der Tagesspiegel, adding that an imminent attack is unlikely “for now.”
“But we also have to learn to live with danger again and prepare ourselves — militarily, socially and in terms of civil defense,” the German minister noted.
Earlier this month, Sweden’s defense minister warned that growing regional tension with Russia, with whom it shares a border, could lead to war.
“For a nation for whom peace has been a pleasant companion for almost 210 years, the idea that it is an immoveable constant is conveniently close at hand,” Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told an annual defense conference held in Sälen. “But taking comfort in this conclusion has become more dangerous than it has been for a very long time. Many have said it before me, but let me do so in an official capacity, more plainly and with naked clarity: There could be war in Sweden.”
The Scandinavian country is poised to join NATO.
Nearly 90,000 NATO troops are participating in a series of military war games in the coming months, the largest such exercise since the end of the Cold War. “Steadfast Defender 2024 will demonstrate NATO’s ability to rapidly deploy forces from North America and other parts of the alliance to reinforce the defence of Europe,” the military alliance said in an official statement.