“President Putin is failing in his brutal war of aggression. He is responding with more brutality. We see wave after wave of deliberate missile attacks on cities and civilian infrastructure. Striking homes, hospitals, and power grids. This is terrible for Ukraine. Indeed, we are all paying a price for Russia’s war against Ukraine. But the price we pay is in money. While the price Ukrainians pay is in blood. And if we let Putin win, all of us will pay a much higher price, for many years to come,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in his opening speech at the Aspen – GMF Bucharest Forum 29 November 2022.
He also said that in response to Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, NATO is also raising the readiness of troops. And we have doubled the number of NATO battlegroups from four to eight.
“So our message from Bucharest is that NATO will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” he stressed.
“The war in Ukraine demonstrated our dangerous dependency on Russian gas. This should also lead us to assess our dependencies on other authoritarian states,” Stoltenberg added.
