The chief of Germany’s foreign intelligence service warned that his agency has “concrete” evidence that Russia is planning an attack on Nato territory.
Bruno Kahl, the outgoing head of Germany’s federal intelligence service (BND), said in a rare interview that Russian leadership no longer believes Nato’s article 5 guarantee of mutual assistance will be honoured — and may seek to test it.
“We are very sure, and we have intelligence evidence to back this up, that [Russia’s full-scale invasion of] Ukraine is only one step on Russia’s path towards the west,” he told a podcast of German outlet Table Briefings.
Kahl qualified that “this doesn’t mean that we expect large tank battalions to roll from the east to the west.”
Kahl said: “We see that Nato is supposed to be tested in its mutual assistance promise. There are people in Moscow who don’t believe that Nato’s article 5 still works.”
[…]
While the war is still confined to Ukrainian territory, the German internal secret service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has warned that Moscow is increasingly extending the conflict to western countries through cyberwarfare and espionage.
Russia has in particular taken to deploying so-called low-level agents to commit acts of sabotage, according to the BfV annual report, which was presented in Berlin on Wednesday. They are believed to have been deployed to plant incendiary devices in parcels, which caused a series of fires in European logistics hubs last year.
“We have noticed that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has led to our cyber and espionage defences being increasingly tested,” Sinan Selim, vice-president of the BfV, said.
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Try it, little bitch. See what happens.
Millions of people would die, thats what would happen
So the alternative is to let dictators run wild and let peoples get surpressed and enslaved? Putin is Marching on wether we decide to defend ourselves or not.
It can both be true that standing up to Putin is the right and just choice, and that any situation where we are forced to do so would be an unconscionable tragedy.
Just because someone isn’t cheering for a war to happen, doesn’t mean they’re asking to bend the knee. Just means they’re conscious of the cost.
If pootin is one of them, I wouldn’t call it too bad.
This makes no sense unless Russian leadership is getting desperate (which they may well be I suppose). They’ve lost over a million people just trying to invade Ukraine. Opening up a second front with a well trained new enemy just seems unwise in the extreme. It would be like fighting a baby elephant and messing that up so deciding to fight the enraged elephant’s Mum as well.
Putin is only getting desperate about keeping his economy afloat, and for that to happen, he has to engage in more conflicts than just the Ukraine genocide. Reports show that he has been transitioning his economy into a more wartime economy, and has been doing so for at least a decade now. Just listen to the defense ministers of the neighbouring nations like the baltic states and finland. They know very well what will come sooner or later, a russian war machine fueled by the indoctrinated hate for the west and a necessity to keep fighting, or risk dying as an empire.
Not a second front. Just a small scale attack to see how they react. It might just be a single missile or a bunch of drones.
For Russia maybe, but it won’t be a small scale attack from NATO.
They’ll push through to Moscow or until pootin is dead.
So, say that Russia tests article 5. This has one of two possible outcomes.
- Article 5 is not honoured which is “yay for Russia” though not very useful for them since militarily they’re stuck in a self-dug pit in Ukraine so don’t actually have the excess military power for handling anything more than a small nation like Montenegro. Meanwhile NATO is hardly going to stop supporting Ukraine (and in fact NATO nations might double up on that support if they feel that NATO doesn’t work anymore as strategically it’s the best way to militarily bleed Russia and make it less dangerous)
- Article 5 is honoured. At which point, who knows how far NATO nations will go in crushing Russia to make sure an attack on a NATO nation doesn’t happen ever again. At the very least Russia would be kicked out of Ukraine pretty quickly and lose pretty much all its air and naval assets.
My point is that this is a MASSIVE risk for Russia if they are wrong, with little concrete and currently achievable upsides if they are indeed right, mainly because they’re stuck and bleeding in Ukraine and a logical fallback plan for European nations if NATO turns out to be toothless is to increase support of Ukraine even more, and specifically for the attacked nation it might even make sense to become a military ally of Ukraine since that’s an ongoing fight in somebody else’s territory.
So to me this sounds like bullshit or this “attack” Kahl is talking about is more of the same which they have already been doing: cyberwar, cutting submarine cables, financing extremist parties. social media disinfo and so on.
It sounds like what most (including me) have said before the conflict in Ukraine. I would personnaly not repeat that mistake and take the words of the BND head very seriously.
