Rutte: Russian Victory Over Ukraine Would Have Costly Impact on NATO's Credibility

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gives a joint press conference with Finland's president and Estonia's prime minister during the Baltic Sea NATO Allies Summit in Helsinki, Finland, 14 January 2025.  EPA/KIMMO BRANDT
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gives a joint press conference with Finland's president and Estonia's prime minister during the Baltic Sea NATO Allies Summit in Helsinki, Finland, 14 January 2025. EPA/KIMMO BRANDT
TT

Rutte: Russian Victory Over Ukraine Would Have Costly Impact on NATO's Credibility

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gives a joint press conference with Finland's president and Estonia's prime minister during the Baltic Sea NATO Allies Summit in Helsinki, Finland, 14 January 2025.  EPA/KIMMO BRANDT
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gives a joint press conference with Finland's president and Estonia's prime minister during the Baltic Sea NATO Allies Summit in Helsinki, Finland, 14 January 2025. EPA/KIMMO BRANDT

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte warned on Thursday that a Russian victory over Ukraine would undermine the dissuasive force of the world’s biggest military alliance and that its credibility could cost trillions to restore.
NATO has been ramping up its forces along its eastern flank with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, deploying thousands of troops and equipment to deter Moscow from expanding its war into the territory of any of the organization’s 32 member countries.
“If Ukraine loses then to restore the deterrence of the rest of NATO again, it will be a much, much higher price than what we are contemplating at this moment in terms of ramping up our spending and ramping up our industrial production,” the Associated Press quoted Rutte as saying.
“It will not be billions extra; it will be trillions extra,” he said, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Rutte insisted that Ukraine’s Western backers must “step up and not scale back the support” they are providing to the country, almost three years after Russia’s full-fledged invasion began.
“We have to change the trajectory of the war,” Rutte said, adding that the West “cannot allow in the 21st century that one country invades another country and tries to colonize it."
"We are beyond those days,” he said.
Anxiety in Europe is mounting that US President Donald Trump might seek to quickly end the war in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on terms that are unfavorable to Ukraine, but Rutte appeared wary about trying to do things in a hurry.
“If we got a bad deal, it would only mean that we will see the president of Russia high-fiving with the leaders from North Korea, Iran and China and we cannot accept that,” the former Dutch prime minister said. “That would be geopolitically a big, big mistake.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski welcomed Trump's acknowledgement that it must be Russia which should make the first peace moves, but he cautioned that “this is not the Putin that President Trump knew in his first term.”
On Wednesday, Trump threatened to impose stiff taxes, tariffs and sanctions on Moscow if an agreement isn’t reached to end the war, but that warning will probably fall on deaf ears in the Kremlin. Russia's economy is already weighed down by a multitude of US and European sanctions.
Sikorksi warned that Putin should not be put at the center of the world stage over Ukraine.
“The president of the United States is the leader of the free world. Vladimir Putin is an outcast and an indicted war criminal for stealing Ukrainian children,” Sikorski said.
"I would suggest that Putin has to earn the summit, that if he gets it early, it elevates him beyond his, significance and gives him the wrong idea about the trajectory of this,” he said.



North Korea Condemns Trump’s Gaza Takeover Proposal as ‘Bluster’ 

Palestinian youth watch the sunset from their destroyed house in the Jabalia camp, north of Gaza City, 11 February 2025. (EPA)
Palestinian youth watch the sunset from their destroyed house in the Jabalia camp, north of Gaza City, 11 February 2025. (EPA)
TT

North Korea Condemns Trump’s Gaza Takeover Proposal as ‘Bluster’ 

Palestinian youth watch the sunset from their destroyed house in the Jabalia camp, north of Gaza City, 11 February 2025. (EPA)
Palestinian youth watch the sunset from their destroyed house in the Jabalia camp, north of Gaza City, 11 February 2025. (EPA)

North Korean state media on Wednesday denounced US President Donald Trump's proposal to take over Gaza and relocate Palestinians as bluster and accused Washington of robbery.

The slim hopes of Palestinians for safety and peace are being crushed by the proposal, a commentary carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said, without directly naming Trump.

"The world is now boiling like a porridge pot over the US' bombshell declaration," KCNA said.

The commentary is aimed at Trump's shock announcement that the US intends to remove Gaza residents and transform the war-ravaged territory into what the president billed as a "Riviera of the Middle East".

The KCNA commentary also criticized the Trump administration over its calls to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland, and its decision to change the name of the "Gulf of Mexico" to the "Gulf of America".

"The US should awaken from its anachronistic daydream and stop at once the act of encroaching upon the dignity and sovereignty of other countries and nations," the KCNA report said, while calling the US a "ferocious robber."

Trump held unprecedented summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his first term and has touted their personal rapport.

The US president recently said he would reach out to Kim again, though so far Pyongyang's state media has barely commented on Trump's second term while continuing to lash out at what it views as the grave security threat posed by Washington and its allies.

North Korea, which often argues against Western views on international issues, has been outspoken about the situation in Gaza, blaming Israel for the bloodshed and calling the United States an "accomplice."