NATO must not be “naive” about Russia, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned, as Europe faces mounting security pressures from Moscow’s ongoing war in Ukraine and sustained hybrid threats along the alliance’s eastern flank. Speaking to TVP World, Professor Beatrice Heuser of the Brussels School of Governance said Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was not the result of failed deterrence, but rather the absence of any clearly articulated deterrent in the first place. “There was no deterrence statement,” she said. “We never made any statements such as ‘do not attack Ukraine or else we will come down on you militarily.’” According to Heuser, economic sanctions alone were never likely to deter the Kremlin. “We know that Putin was simply not deterred by sanctions. It was not something that frightened him,” she said, adding that NATO consistently emphasized it would defend its own members, but not Ukraine. Heuser said that Russia’s ambitions predated the war by many years. “Since he became president, there has been this desire to reconstitute the Tsarist Russian Empire,” she said, adding that diplomacy alone could not have altered that objective. Turning to NATO’s eastern flank, Heuser said allied deployments in Poland and the Baltic states are both significant and necessary. “The creation of the German brigade in Lithuania and the stationing of Canadian forces in Latvia — all that is very, very important,” she said. However, she identified a deeper vulnerability within the alliance itself. “Our Achilles” heel is our own populations,” Heuser warned, citing a lack of public understanding about the seriousness of the threat posed by Russia. She criticized what she called “a complete miscomprehension of what Putin wants and what he is willing to do,” noting that Russia has shown itself “very willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives in order to achieve his aims.” To counter that challenge, Heuser said Western governments must communicate more forcefully and consistently. “We have to speak more to people — not just on television, but on social media,” she said, calling for sustained efforts to compete with what she described as “this enormous propaganda machine coming from the Kremlin — and from China.” On nuclear deterrence, Heuser said that Russia’s strategy has already proven effective without a single missile being launched. “The saber-rattling has been quite enough,” she said. “Western populations are so afraid that we have completely self-inhibited ourselves from supporting Ukraine the way we should.” Looking ahead, Heuser warned against fragmented European defense strategies. “A flawed strategy would be to emphasize nation-states acting alone,” she said. “We are simply too small. It has to be collective.”
