NATO squares up to Russia as Vladimir Putin slams ‘imperial’ alliance

Russia branded the most significant and direct threat to allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.

Genadiy, 51, injured in the Amstor mall missile attack, receives medical treatment at a hospital in Kremenchuk on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

The US has vowed to reinforce Europe’s defences in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as NATO declared Moscow the West’s greatest threat – prompting Vladimir Putin to lash out at the alliance’s “imperial ambitions”.

Meeting in Madrid overnight on Wednesday, NATO leaders said Russia was “the most significant and direct threat to allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area”.

This came as NATO officially invited Sweden and Finland to join the alliance, and US President Joe Biden announced new deployments of US troops, ships and planes. Mr Biden said that the US move was exactly what Russian President Putin “didn’t want” – and Moscow, facing fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces equipped with Western arms, reacted with predictable fury.

Mr Putin accused the alliance of seeking to assert its “supremacy”, saying in the Turkmenistan capital of Ashgabat that Ukraine and its people are “a means” for NATO to “defend their own interests”. “The NATO countries’ leaders wish to … assert their supremacy, their imperial ambitions,” he added.

NATO leaders have funnelled billions of dollars of arms to Ukraine and faced a renewed appeal from President Volodymyr Zelensky for more long-range artillery. “Ukraine can count on us for as long as it takes,” NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said at the summit, which ends overnight on Thursday, as he announced a new strategic overview that focuses on the Moscow threat.

The document, updated for the first time since 2010, warned that the alliance “cannot discount the possibility” of an attack on its members.

“Today in Madrid, NATO proved it can take difficult but essential decisions. We welcome a clear-eyed stance on Russia, as well as the accession for Finland and Sweden,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

But Mr Putin dismissed NATO’s invitations to Finland and Sweden, which abandoned decades of non-alignment in response to the invasion, as “no problem”.

Russian missiles continued to rain down across Ukraine. Mr Zelensky said that a missile strike on the southern city of Mykolaiv destroyed a five-storey building, killing at least five people.

The city of Lysychansk in the eastern Donbas region – the focus of Russia’s offensive – was also facing sustained bombardment. The frequency of the shelling there is “enormous”, the regional governor of Luhansk, SerHiy Haidai, said in televised comments, adding that the evacuation of some 15,000 civilians still in the city “might be dangerous at the moment”.

In Kremenchuk, the town where a Russian missile destroyed a shopping centre on Monday and killed at least 18 civilians, clearing operations continued.

A crane was working near the site of the impact, and in the rubble-strewn parking area shopping trolleys piled with clothes and household goods lay abandoned.

At a hospital in the city, some of the wounded recalled the moment of the attack. “We didn’t hear the sound of the missile hit – a sudden clap, flash, and we got blown away,” said Petr Ozhereliev, an employee at the Amstor mall. “I guess I lost consciousness, because when I woke up I was crawling out of the rubble.”

Western leaders have dubbed the Kremenchuk strike a war crime. Russia says it hit a depot storing Western arms, and on Wednesday Mr Putin denied Moscow’s forces were responsible for the attack.

Ukrainian officials said that 144 of their soldiers, most of them former defenders of the Azovstal steelworks in the southern port city of Mariupol, had been freed in a prisoner swap with Moscow.

Moscow’s invasion triggered massive economic sanctions and a wave of support for Mr Zelensky’s government, including deliveries of advanced weapons, as well as the reinforcement of Europe’s defences.

Washington has announced it will shift the headquarters of its 5th Army Corps to Poland. An army brigade will rotate in and out of Romania, two squadrons of F-35 fighters will deploy to Britain, US air defence systems will be sent to Germany and Italy, and the fleet of US Navy destroyers in Spain will grow from four to six.

Britain also pledged another $US1.2bn in military aid for Ukraine, including air defence systems and drones.

In a report released on Thursday, Amnesty International said a theatre sheltering civilians destroyed in March in the besieged city of Mariupol was probably hit by a Russian airstrike in a war crime. Nevertheless, the group also found the death toll may have been smaller than initially believed. Amnesty believes at least a dozen people died in the attack, although it is likely many additional fatalities remain unreported. Mariupol authorities had provided an initial estimate of about 300 deaths.

AFP