Nato’s decision to increase defence spending will not significantly affect Russia’s security, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has said it stopped Russian advances in the northern region of Sumy, while Russian troops took control of a village in eastern Ukraine located close to a lithium deposit.
Nato allies on Wednesday agreed to raise their collective spending goal to 5 per cent of gross domestic product over the next decade, citing what they called the long-term threat posed by Russia and the need to strengthen civil and military resilience.
“As for the impact of this 5 per cent goal on our security, I don’t think it will be significant,” Mr Lavrov told a press conference.
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“We know what goals we are pursuing, we don’t hide them, we openly announce them, they are absolutely legal from the point of view of any interpretation of the principles of the UN Charter and international law, and we know by what means we will always ensure these goals.”
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Nato adopted the higher spending target in response to pressure from US president Donald Trump for European members to pull their weight within the alliance, and in response to European fears that Russia poses a growing threat to their security following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Russia, which is spending more than 40 per cent of this year’s budget on defence and security, denies any intention to attack a Nato state.
Ukraine’s forces stopped Russian advances near the Sumy border this week, the country’s top general said in a statement on Thursday.
“The advance of Russian troops in the border areas of Sumy region has been halted, and the line of combat has stabilised,” Oleksandr Syrskyi said in the statement about his visit to the front.
Russia in April said it had ejected Ukrainian forces from the western Russian region of Kursk, and president Vladimir Putin has ordered his forces to follow up by carving out a “buffer zone” in the adjoining Sumy region.
After Russian advances there in early June, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said his troops were repelling the attacks and had recaptured the village of Andriivka.
Russian troops have taken control of a village in eastern Ukraine which is close to a lithium deposit after fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces, a Russian-backed official said on Thursday.
The village of Shevchenko is located in Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions – in addition to Crimea – that Moscow has claimed as its own territory in annexations that Kyiv and western powers reject as illegal.
The Russian defence ministry announced earlier on Thursday that Shevchenko had been taken along with another settlement, Novoserhiivka.
The battlefield report could not be independently confirmed and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Open source mapping from Deep State, an authoritative Ukrainian military blogging resource, showed Shevchenko under Russian control.
Soviet geologists who discovered the lithium deposit there in 1982 suggested it could be significant. – Reuters
