NATO’s Stoltenberg warns Russia is ‘preparing for more war’

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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned that Russia is preparing significant manpower for its offensive in Ukraine in the spring.

“But the challenge is that we don’t see any signs that President Putin and rulers in Moscow are preparing for peace. We see the opposite. We see that they are preparing for more war, that they are mobilizing more soldiers, more than 200,000, and potentially even more than that,” the NATO leader said on Monday while traveling in South Korea.

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He also pointed out that Russia is continuing to acquire weapons from North Korea and Iran, with drones from the latter proving to be a major aspect of the war. Tehran has provided Russian forces with hundreds of kamikaze drones that they have used mainly to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this past fall in an attempt to break the will of the Ukrainian people through the brutal winter conditions.

Jens Stoltenberg
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg meets the media during a press conference at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys)

“They are actively acquiring new weapons, more ammunition, ramping up their own production, but also acquiring more weapons from other authoritarian states like Iran and North Korea,” he continued. “And most of all, we have seen no sign that President Putin has changed his overall goal of this invasion, that is, to control a neighbor, to control Ukraine. So as long as this is the case, we need to be prepared for the long haul.”

Stoltenberg, like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, warned that Ukraine needs a constant stream of military aid to ensure they’re able to retake their territory.

“I urge the Republic of Korea to continue and to step up,” Stoltenberg said at the CHEY Institute in Seoul. “On the specific issue of military support, I would say that’s at the end of the day a decision for you to make … if you believe in freedom, if you believe in democracy, if you don’t want autocracy and tyranny to win, then they need weapons.”

Zelensky said in his Sunday address, “The speed of supply has been and will be one of the key factors in this war. Russia hopes to drag out the war, to exhaust our forces. So we have to make time our weapon. We must speed up the events, speed up the supply and opening of new necessary weaponry options for Ukraine.”

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Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in mid-January that it’s unlikely Ukraine will be able to push Russia out of their territory by the end of the calendar year.

“From a military standpoint, I still maintain that for this year, it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from every inch of Russian-occupied Ukraine,” he said.

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