What is Vladimir Putin planning? Another secret service has now come to a sobering conclusion in a report. A defense minister is already demanding consequences.
The Danish Defense Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, FE) has issued a new threat assessment on the threat from Russia. As Danish media report, the secret service comes to the conclusion in a report that the situation has worsened. Accordingly, it is now assumed that Russia could no longer only attack the NATO states with hybrid means, but could also use military force.
After Sweden, Norway, Poland and the German government, which, in the person of Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, have already warned of a military emergency in the coming years, the Danish government is now also painting a pessimistic picture of the threat posed by Putin’s Russia. The FE report considers the possibility that Putin will “challenge the NATO states” to be “very likely”.
Last week, Denmark’s Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen called for a national defense plan approved in 2023 to be reopened because it was not sufficient in view of the Russian threat. “If we look at the fact that Russia has ramped up the production of military equipment very decisively and very quickly, then that puts us under pressure in Europe and in NATO. We have to react to it,” said Poulsen in an interview with the newspaper ” The Local”.
Last year, the parties in the Danish parliament agreed on a military budget for the coming years, according to which 150 billion Danish crowns (around 20 billion euros) are earmarked for defense spending by 2030. Poulsen is now calling on the parties to renegotiate this package and to significantly increase it.
Rather than a direct attack on NATO land
“There is no doubt that the Russian threat is real. If you ask around and talk to your colleagues, which I did yesterday with those from Poland, for example, then it cannot be ruled out that Russia will join the NATO states in a few years could attack,” said the Danish Defense Minister.
Only on Monday, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz did not rule out the possibility of war with Russia. Poland must prepare for such a war, he told the daily newspaper Super Express.
When asked whether he considered a military defeat for Ukraine and a direct attack on Poland by Russia to be possible, the conservative politician replied: “I expect every scenario and take the worst ones most seriously. That is the job of a defense minister in the situation that we find ourselves in today.”
However, the Danish secret service FE also comes to the conclusion in its report that Putin will probably be careful not to trigger the NATO alliance. This means that the intelligence services consider a direct attack on a NATO country to be rather unlikely. In contrast, the Russian autocrat will put pressure on the NATO countries by regularly sending planes and warships to violate national borders or by massing his army along the border of a NATO country.