Mark Rutte took over from Jens Stoltenberg as Secretary General of NATO this Tuesday (1).
The war in Ukraine has put NATO – founded in 1949 to deter and defend any attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union – back at the center of international affairs.
Officials and diplomats hope Rutte will stick to Stoltenberg’s priorities — rallying support for Ukraine, pushing NATO countries to spend more on defense and keeping the U.S. engaged in European security.
Rutte said on Tuesday that Ukraine’s right to self-defense “does not end at the border.”
Rutte admitted that the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine is difficult, but added that Russia’s advances come at a very high cost.
“Recent estimates I am receiving, and probably you too, of Russian losses of around 1,000 killed or wounded per day. And this is in addition to the total of 500,000 already dead or injured,” Rutte said.
Kremlin: Rutte represents continuity
Russia said on Tuesday it did not expect any policy changes from new NATO chief Mark Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands who replaced Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg as the alliance’s secretary-general.
“Our expectations are that the North Atlantic alliance will continue to work in the same direction in which it has been working,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a news conference, adding that President Vladimir Putin knew Rutte well from previous meetings.
“At one point, there were hopes for the possibility of building good pragmatic relations – at least such a dialogue was conducted – but later we learned that the Netherlands took a somewhat irreconcilable position, a position on the complete exclusion of any contacts with our country” , he said.
“So we don’t think anything significantly new will happen in alliance politics.”
(With information from Reuters)
This content was originally published in New NATO chief takes office and defends aid to Ukraine on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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