Russia Ready to Strike NATO by 2030, Warns NATO, in Call to Increase Air Defence 400 Per Cent

The head of the NATO sounded the alarm on Russia and its allies considerably out-producing the alliance on crucial military equipment and materiel, calling on allies to learn the lesson of the Ukraine war and make a significant investment in enhanced air defence.

Ahead of this month’s crunch NATO summit in the Netherlands, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte addressed Chatham House in London on Monday to warn “the world we thought we were entering in after Berlin Wall came down is definitely gone” and despite the Russian economy being small, it is massively outproducing the west in war materiel.

Secretary General Mark Rutte called for a five-fold increase in NATO’s air defence systems, a call that follows only by weeks U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of the ‘Golden Dome‘ Israel-style missile shield. Yet Europe has no plans to so defend itself and the state of NATO defence procurement is presently so poor that even if it decided to do so now, getting the systems in place would come long behind Russia being readied to strike NATO, Rutte claimed.

On the threat to the alliance that he said should be robustly deterred by demonstrating that NATO remains a credible defensive alliance that does not threaten others but would punish transgressions against it with overwhelming force, Rutte told the London audience that “because of Russia, war has returned to Europe” and, in a comparison to the United Kingdom re-arming in the late 1930s, “history has taught us that to preserve peace we must prepare for war… we cannot dream away the danger”.

A major part of Rutte’s warning was on the issue of industrial capacity, and that while Russia has a considerably smaller economy than NATO — and many individual NATO allies — it is so focussed on defence production, it outperforms the alliance several times over. He said:

Putin’s war machine is speeding up, now slowing down. Russia is reconstituting its forces with Chinese technology and producing more weapons faster than we thought. In terms of ammunition Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year. Its defence industrial base is expected to roll out 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armoured vehicles, and 200 Iskander missiles this year alone. Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO in five years. Let’s not kid ourselves, we’re all on the eastern flank now

…The world we thought we were entering in after Berlin Wall came down is definitely gone. This whole idea of a pleasant, peaceful living together with the Russians is gone… [Putin’s] economy is on a total war footing… NATO economies are 25 times bigger than Russia… that [Russian] economy is producing four times as much ammunition than the whole of NATO is producing at the moment.

Russia was not the only risk identified by Rutte, who noted the United States was having to pivot to Asia to support non-NATO allies there threatened by Chinese expansionism. There too a production gap had opened, and he said:

[China] will have in 2030 a hundred more ships than the U.S. has currently. And they’ll have a defence-industrial base in China to build even more ships which the Americans at this moment can absolutely not compete with. And this is one of the big issues we have, that when it comes to defence spending there is an issue with Europe and Canada. [But] When it comes to defence production there is an issue with Europe, Canada, and the United States because all over the alliance we are not producing enough.

Rutte called on NATO members to boost their combined defence spending to five per cent of GDP, including 3.5 per cent on core, traditional military costs such as are presently covered by the 2 per cent NATO spending floor, plus an addition 1.5 per cent on “security-related investments including infrastructure and building industrial capacity”. But specifically he identified the hammering Ukraine has taken from Russia from the air over the course of that war, and said huge investments are needed in air defence and the sooner the better.

On the industrial lag-time to get those systems — which are in high demand already — Rutte warned: “take Patriot, the most important air defence system we have, the most advanced… you will get it in ten years if you order it today… these are the timelines we are facing at the moment and I am only slightly exaggerating here… what keeps me awake at night is not only the spending part… it’s the defence production”.

On the need for a NATO missile defence shield, Rutte said: “what we need is a 400% increase in air and missile defence. We have seen in Ukraine how Russia delivers terror from above, so we strengthen the shield that protects our skies… We need five times as many systems to defend ourselves against missiles”.

Rutte’s “plan to build a better NATO” came the same day as what was called the largest Russian airstrike against Ukraine of that war so far, with nearly 500 drones and missiles launched. The attack was of a scale, and coming close enough to the alliance’s eastern border, that Poland scrambled jets to protect NATO airspace, although it later confirmed the operation concluded with no detected incursions.

The warning of Russia being able to regenerate its military capacity and being motivated to attack a NATO member by 2030 is the latest such claim with a variety of dates proposed. A 2024 leaked German military planning document mooted a “path to conflict” that foresaw the possibility of war with Russia as soon as 2025. Another, less pessimistic German foreign policy paper in 2023 stated NATO must “be able to repel a Russian attack within ten years at the latest, and preferably within six.”.

A Polish report the same year called that hopelessly optimistic, stating instead NATO should be ready for 2026 in order to deter war.

The United Kingdom had cast an even darker pall, warning not just of the possibility of war with Russia but the West also having to fight Chine, Iran, and North Korea at the same time. The then-British defence minister said the “pre-war” era is over and: “In five years time we could be looking at multiple theatres including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea… we find ourselves at the dawn of this new era. [The] Berlin Wall a distant memory but we have come full circle, moving from a post-war to a pre-war world. An age of idealism has been replaced by a period of hard-headed realism.”

Russia responded to Rutte’s remarks on Monday, and rejected his caveats that NATO is a purely defensive alliance and that the purpose of increased investment in defence is to deter conflict, not to cause it. Moscow’s chief of foreign affairs Sergei Lavrov said: “The North Atlantic Alliance has dropped its mask and is now openly demonstrating its nature as an instrument of aggression and confrontation… It’s not an instrument for maintaining stability and security on the continent. It’s a tool designed for confrontation”.