NATO UNDERFUNDED ITS DEFENSE FOR YEARS WHILE RUSSIA INCREASED WEAPONS PRODUCTION - CNN

 The 75-year history of NATO can be described in three actions, each of which is defined by existential threats to the security of the West. This is stated in the material of CNN.

It is noted that, firstly, there was the Cold War and the Soviet threat. The second act came in the 1990s and 2000s, when NATO first deployed troops in Bosnia and Kosovo, then Afghanistan and Iraq. Beginning in 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin's first invasion of Ukraine and ISIS's self-proclaimed caliphate brought armed threats right back to the Alliance's borders.

"NATO's fourth act may be defined by a crisis that unfolds at a slow pace. For more than a decade, allies have chronically underspent on defense, while Western adversaries have modernized and strengthened their own military capabilities. The most obvious way to understand the impact of this is a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022," writes the media.

In particular, journalists emphasize that the underfunding of defense budgets over a long period of time has numerous consequences - from a smaller number of troops to poor maintenance of equipment. At the same time, in the context of the war in Ukraine, the limited and rapidly dwindling stockpiles of ammunition that the West could provide to Kyiv may have caused the greatest damage.

"NATO's task was not to protect Ukraine from invasion. Ukraine is not a member of NATO and has only formally announced its intention to join after the 2022 invasion. However, the nature of NATO allies' support to Ukraine – mostly direct military support – revealed the Alliance's vulnerability due to years of underfunding," the journalists state.

UKRAINE AND NATO - LATEST NEWS

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced two scenarios for the development of the war in Ukraine. One of them is that NATO allies will be able to mobilize more support and Ukraine will be able to regain more territory.

Another scenario, he said, is that "we will not be able to do this, and then there is a serious risk that Russia will seize even more territory, and then we will be in an even more dangerous position."

It was also reported that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that Ukraine will become a member of NATO. According to him, the support of Kyiv by the countries of the Alliance remains "strong as a rock".