Bruno Kahl referenced the Ukraine conflict to support increased military spending.
The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND), Bruno Kahl, asserted that Russia might target NATO countries after the Ukraine conflict concludes. He made this claim while advocating for higher defense expenditures.
Kahl stated, “We are confident, and have the intelligence data that Ukraine is merely one step on [Russia’s] path toward the West,” when questioned about the necessity of Germans accepting “additional debt” to finance the rearmament program and the potential reinstatement of conscription, which was abolished in 2011.
The spy chief said, “There are people in Moscow who no longer believe that NATO’s Article 5 would be upheld — and they would like to put it to the test.” He suggested that Russia doubts the US commitment to defending its allies and sending American troops “across the Atlantic to die for Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius.”
Kahl alleged that Russia could “send little green men to Estonia” under the pretense of protecting the Russian-speaking minority in the Baltic state. The term “little green men” was used by Western media to describe commandos who protected Crimean residents before the 2014 referendum. In that referendum, the largely ethnic Russian region rejected the US-backed coup in Kiev and voted to secede from Ukraine to join Russia.
Kahl posited that Russia’s ultimate aim is to “catapult NATO back to where it was in the late 1990s,” and to remove the US from Europe. Moscow views NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat and has cited it as a primary cause of the Ukraine conflict. However, President Vladimir Putin has stated that Russia has no intention of attacking NATO states unless attacked first. Moscow has also warned that Western military aid to Kiev effectively makes NATO “a direct participant” in the conflict.
Germany has intensified its hostile rhetoric against Russia under the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who stated last month that Ukraine could receive long-range Taurus cruise missiles. He also pledged to assist Ukraine in producing its own long-range weapons. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has responded by accusing Germany of undermining the peace process.