Ukraine’s allies should raise their annual defense spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product as Russia’s war in Ukraine has stoked fears of its future intentions, a top official in Estonia said.
(Bloomberg) — Ukraine’s allies should raise their annual defense spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product as Russia’s war in Ukraine has stoked fears of its future intentions, a top official in Estonia said.
While Estonia’s government recently agreed a 3% floor, most of NATO’s members have failed to meet a 2% threshold set in 2006. Under the Estonian proposal, a quarter of spending would also go to acquiring new military capabilities, Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu said ahead of a meeting with allied foreign ministers set to start in Brussels on Tuesday.
The spending target will be a major topic of debate at the NATO summit in Vilnius in July, laying bare differences in regional priorities between Eastern European countries bordering Russia and their allies further afield.
“Understandably, countries have varying perceptions of the threat,” Reinsalu, who’s set to leave office in the coming weeks as a new ruling coalition comes to power, said in an interview in Tallinn. “Presumably, it is a much more a philosophical problem for countries that are watching this from afar, or who are not frontline countries.”
The three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have often voiced fears of potentially becoming next victims of Vladimir Putin’s military expansionism. The nations will seek anti-aircraft support, currently seen as a major vulnerability, from NATO at the Vilnius summit.
Estonia and neighboring Latvia have agreed to jointly acquire air-defense systems by 2025, and in the meantime will ask allies to provide support on a rotational basis.
Reinsalu called on NATO to scrap its 1997 cooperation agreement with Russia — a measure he said was also supported by Poland — and to outline plans for Ukraine to become a member of NATO after the war ends.
“The Vilnius summit should give a clear political signal with wording that is stronger than abstractly repeating NATO’s open door policy,” he said. He added that many political leaders are hesitant about Ukraine’s membership because it would undermine Putin’s demands of a neutral Kyiv in any potential peace talks with Moscow.
Reinsalu, who has made nine trips to Ukraine over the past year, said Kyiv is facing pressure from some Western capitals to launch an expected major counteroffensive.
If time runs out, some allies will want to seek a political compromise that could entail territorial demands and Ukraine’s neutrality, he said. That has no support among Ukrainains, he added.
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