NATO allies intend to discuss speeding up the procurement of weapons at their upcoming summit in Washington, reported Semafor.
“Critical gaps” in the alliance’s military readiness need to be addressed, it quoted three European officials as saying, as the bloc continues to funnel weapons to the Kiev regime.
Action is expected to be taken on a plan put forward by the NATO’s three Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, which have been at the forefront of anti-Russian hysteria throughout the Ukrainian crisis, along with Poland.
The Allied Capability Delivery Commitment (ACDC) was presented at a May meeting in Palanga, Lithuania, by the defense ministers of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. At the time, speaking at a press conference with Latvia's Andris Spruds and Lithuania's Laurynas Kasciunas, Estonia’s Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur said the initiative required extra funds, and the 2 percent minimum spending level agreed at the 2023 summit was no longer "sufficient".
In line with the five-year plan, the alliance would boost efforts to procure “air defense, long range fires, and ammunition,” Tuuli Duneton, Undersecretary for Defense Policy at the Estonian Ministry of Defense, told the outlet.
“Delivering these [weapons] faster than originally planned would require additional resources to be invested,” one European official was quoted as acknowledging.
He added that the plan had been agreed upon in principle at a June meeting of NATO’s defense ministers in Brussels.
As far as Washington is concerned, it “supports the intent of the proposal and is working with allies on how to incorporate it in summit deliverables,” a US State Department official was cited as saying. The underlying ideas of the proposal will be “embedded” in the Defense Industrial Pledge expected to be signed at the summit, a Latvian spokesperson told the publication.
More defense spending and costly procurement face NATO allies as supporting the regime in Kiev continues to bleed their own stockpiles dry. The bloc's European allies have only a small fraction of the air defense capabilities they would need if the proxy conflict in Ukraine expanded into a direct Russia-NATO confrontation, officials were cited as saying by the Financial Times.
At the same time, the Ukraine conflict has become a great boon for America's own leading defense contractors, sending their stocks up and boosting their profits. However, as the US and Europe keep squandering taxpayer money on arms for Ukraine, Russia continues to effectively destroy this weaponry.
Russia has persistently cautioned Western countries against furnishing weapons to the Kiev regime, stating that this sort of assistance would only serve to prolong the conflict in Ukraine.
Furthermore, Moscow has repeatedly rejected Western claims about an alleged Russian threat as unsubstantiated. Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that the West’s allegations about Moscow’s plans to unleash a war with NATO are "simply rubbish." He also slammed reports about Russia planning to attack Europe after the end of a special military operation in Ukraine as “complete nonsense and intimidation of Europeans to squeeze money out of them [for defense-related] purposes.”