In an interview with FP, the former chief of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said Russia would focus attention on the Baltic states if it isn’t stopped in Ukraine.
“Ukraine must win this war because if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he won’t stop,” he said in the interview published by Foreign Policy on June 6. “He will continue into Moldova, Georgia, and eventually also put pressure on the three Baltic states.”
Rasmussen, who served as NATO’s secretary-general in 2009–2014, also defended the alliance’s expansion into Eastern Europe.
“I think people should reflect on the debate on why is it that Russia’s neighbours, time and again, want membership of NATO to get security guarantees?”
Meanwhile, he said the alliance made a mistake during the 2008 summit in Bucharest that paved the way for Russia’s wars against Georgia and Ukraine. By stating that the two countries would become members of the alliance but not providing the so-called roadmap NATO “sent the wrong message to Putin, who attacked Georgia a few months after in August 2008”.
Talking about the current war in Ukraine, Rasmussen said “we have made two miscalculations”.
“We have overestimated the strength of the Russian military” and also “the brutality and the ambitions of President Putin”.
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