Secretary General Rutte: NATO will not be intimidated by Russian threats

(Patria) - NATO will not be intimidated by Russian threats and will continue its strong support for Kyiv, said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte during his first visit to the Ukrainian mission to the alliance in Wiesbaden, which is set to take over the coordination of military aid from the United States.

"The message (to Russian President Vladimir Putin) is that we will continue, that we will do everything necessary to ensure that he does not succeed, that Ukraine will win," he said.

Rutte spoke at Clay Barracks, a US base that houses the headquarters of the new mission, called NATO-Ukraine Security Assistance and Training (NSATU), which will gradually take over the coordination of Western military aid to Kyiv, Reuters reported.

This move is widely seen as an attempt to protect the aid mechanism from the potential return of NATO critic Donald Trump to the White House. Republican Trump is running against Democrat Kamala Harris in the US elections on November 5. Diplomats, however, acknowledge that handing over the coordination of military aid to NATO could have a limited effect given that the US is the dominant power in NATO and provides most of the weapons to Ukraine.

Speaking in one of the twelve green tents housing NSATU, Rutte addressed allied troops from more than a dozen countries earlier on Monday who are already working on the mission, which will, at a later stage, move to a nearby hangar and be supplemented by Ukrainian troops.

NSATU is expected to have around 700 personnel, including troops stationed at NATO's military headquarters SHAPE in Belgium and at logistics centers in Poland and Romania.

The Wiesbaden base also houses a US unit responsible for long-range missiles that Washington will temporarily deploy to Germany from 2026 to counter what both countries describe as a threat posed by Russian missiles stationed near Kaliningrad, some 500 kilometers from Berlin.

During his first visit to Germany as NATO chief, Rutte welcomed the move, which Russia has declared a provocation and which has sparked fierce debate within Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party.

Rutte, who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 2010 to 2024, said it is crucial for NATO to have the full range of capabilities needed for deterrence against the Russian threat.

"We are NATO. We are a defensive alliance, we are not offensive. We are not interested in occupying any part of any other country outside NATO territory," he said.

"As this democratic alliance, the strongest military alliance in world history, serving a billion people, we are ready to face any threat. We will never be intimidated by our adversaries."

US President Joe Biden and Scholz announced the deployment of missiles on the sidelines of the NATO summit in July, describing it as a temporary solution until Germany, France, and several other European countries develop their own missiles of similar range.