The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service BND warned on Wednesday of increasing hybrid attacks by Russia on Germany and the NATO defense alliance, with the underlying aim of testing the alliance in the hope that it would fail.
Bruno Kahl said at a meeting of the German Foreign Policy Association in Berlin that BND experts believe that senior Russian Defense Ministry officials apparently harbor doubts about whether NATO’s mutual defense obligations and the US’s extended deterrent Europe would hold out. a serious situation, he explained.
“Currently there is no evidence of concrete war intentions by Russia. But if such views gain ground in government headquarters in Moscow, the risk of a military confrontation in the coming years also grows.”
Kahl does not believe that Russia would engage in such a confrontation to gain territory, but rather to destroy NATO.
“Certainly expansive territorial acquisition would not be the focus,” he said [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s goal is that NATO will fail as a defense alliance.
Nuclear rumbling
Before a military confrontation with NATO, the Kremlin would likely threaten Europe first — “the occasional audible nuclear rumble is also part of this,” Kahl said.
Russia reportedly wants to test its willingness to help before an offensive confrontation and deter individual allies from common political lines and defense. Moscow would therefore try to divide NATO before a possible war breaks out, the BND chief warned.
“The Kremlin probably assumes that in a world marked by multiple conflicts, the West is struggling to find the right joint answers,” he added.
Moscow’s readiness for further escalation has reached an all-time high, Kahl noted. This increases the risk that the NATO Alliance will have to collectively defend a member, adding that a further deterioration of the situation was likely.
With the build-up of Russia’s military potential, “a direct military confrontation with NATO becomes a possible course of action for the Kremlin,” Kahl said.
He believes that the Russian armed forces will likely be capable in terms of both personnel and equipment to launch an attack on NATO by the end of the decade.
