Russian sabotage assaults on Europe should end with more weapons flowing to Ukraine, NATO’s top commander in Europe says. NATO should respond to the attacks by increasing contributions to the alliance’s PURL weapons program or by sending Ukraine more air-defense interceptor missiles, Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alexus Grynkewich said at the Warsaw Security Forum, Ukrinform reports.
The remark runs counter to a fresh scare. After US President Donald Trump’s diesel deal with Russia, European officials said that Washington had threatened to halt weapons for Ukraine through PURL, the Financial Times reports, unless Kyiv stopped hitting Russian refineries. Grynkewich’s call to expand the program ran the other way.
One of the main goals of Russia’s hybrid operations, from airspace violations to sabotage and cyberattacks, is to break the West’s will to keep backing Ukraine, he stated. The sharpest answer is to prove that assumption wrong, he argued, turning each attack into a reason to send more.
The PURL program that lets allies fund US-made weapons for Ukraine, which drew nearly $5.5 billion in pledges before May.
Name the culprit out loud, and watch Moscow lose its cover
Once responsibility for a specific attack is established, countries should publicly name who did it, Grynkewich noted, so Russia understands it has been exposed and that its network was never as untraceable as it believed.
Moscow bets it can escape blame because the West cannot work out who is behind an attack, in his telling. The response, he urged, should be to show that the West can.
One voice, not thirty-two, is what Russia actually fears
Coordination is the other half. Allies must craft a joint response rather than send Moscow chaotic, uncoordinated signals from individual states, he stressed, and must spell out clearly where their red lines lie.
That unity is itself a deterrent. A single, agreed answer tells Russia the alliance is harder to split than its hybrid campaign assumes, and that attacks meant to divide the West only harden its resolve, he contends.
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