“Ukraine must win this war because if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he won’t stop”
In an interview with Foreign Policy, former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia would focus its attention on the Baltic states if it isn’t stopped in Ukraine.
“Ukraine must win this war because if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he won’t stop,” the former chief of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in the interview published by Foreign Policy. “He will continue into Moldova, Georgia, and eventually also put pressure on the three Baltic states.”
Rasmussen, who served as NATO Secretary-General from 2009 to 2014, also defended the alliance’s expansion into Eastern Europe.
“I think, people should reflect on the debate on why is it that Russia’s neighbors, time and again, want membership of NATO to get security guarantees?”
Meanwhile, he said the alliance made a mistake during the 2008 summit in Bucharest that paved the way for Russia’s wars against Georgia and Ukraine. By stating that the two countries would become members of the alliance without providing the so-called roadmap, NATO “sent the wrong message to Putin, who attacked Georgia a few months after in August 2008.”
Talking about the current war in Ukraine, Rasmussen said, “we have made two miscalculations. We have overestimated the strength of the Russian military and also the brutality and the ambitions of President Putin.”
