The decisions taken as the NATO summit in Washington closed Thursday show the NATO imperialist powers are planning direct military intervention against nuclear-armed Russia. The day before, the NATO alliance had announced the creation of an office in Ukraine and of a NATO command in Germany to coordinate the war offensive against Russia.
The NATO powers pledged this week $40 billion more in military spending for the Ukrainian regime and that they would eventually let Ukraine into the 75-year-old military alliance. Most provocatively, Washington and Berlin agreed to station long-range guided missiles aimed at Russia in Germany. A joint declaration by the US and German governments states:
The United States will begin episodic deployments of the long-range fires capabilities of its Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany in 2026, as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future. When fully developed, these conventional long-range fires units will include SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons, which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe.
The NATO countries, having overseen missile strikes from Ukraine on Russian civilians in Belgorod and Sevastopol, are now creating conditions to launch missile strikes on almost all of Russia’s major population centers. Tomahawk cruise missiles, with a range of over 2000 kilometers, can strike deep into Russia. The shortest distance between Berlin and Moscow is just under 1,600 kilometers.
The Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) has a range of 1,725 miles (2,776 kilometers) and can evade missile defense systems. According to the US Army, “this land-based, truck-launched system is armed with hypersonic missiles capable of traveling well over 3,800 miles per hour. They can reach the upper edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and remain just beyond the range of air and missile defense systems until they are operational, at which point it is too late to respond.”
LRHWs deployed in Germany could not only hit Russia’s largest cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. They could also reach Russian cities deep inside Eurasia such as Nizhni-Novgorod, Perm, Ufa, Saratov, and large parts of western Kazakhstan.
The decisions taken as the NATO summit in Washington closed Thursday show the NATO imperialist powers are planning direct military intervention against nuclear-armed Russia. The day before, the NATO alliance had announced the creation of an office in Ukraine and of a NATO command in Germany to coordinate the war offensive against Russia.
The NATO powers pledged this week $40 billion more in military spending for the Ukrainian regime and that they would eventually let Ukraine into the 75-year-old military alliance. Most provocatively, Washington and Berlin agreed to station long-range guided missiles aimed at Russia in Germany. A joint declaration by the US and German governments states:
The United States will begin episodic deployments of the long-range fires capabilities of its Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany in 2026, as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future. When fully developed, these conventional long-range fires units will include SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons, which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe.
The NATO countries, having overseen missile strikes from Ukraine on Russian civilians in Belgorod and Sevastopol, are now creating conditions to launch missile strikes on almost all of Russia’s major population centers. Tomahawk cruise missiles, with a range of over 2000 kilometers, can strike deep into Russia. The shortest distance between Berlin and Moscow is just under 1,600 kilometers.
The Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) has a range of 1,725 miles (2,776 kilometers) and can evade missile defense systems. According to the US Army, “this land-based, truck-launched system is armed with hypersonic missiles capable of traveling well over 3,800 miles per hour. They can reach the upper edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and remain just beyond the range of air and missile defense systems until they are operational, at which point it is too late to respond.”
LRHWs deployed in Germany could not only hit Russia’s largest cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. They could also reach Russian cities deep inside Eurasia such as Nizhni-Novgorod, Perm, Ufa, Saratov, and large parts of western Kazakhstan.
These are lies. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was reactionary, but it is NATO, not Russia, that plays the most aggressive role in the war. NATO’s population outweighs Russia’s by 900 million to 144 million, and has 3.3 million active-duty soldiers against 1.3 million for Russia. NATO countries have marched their troops up to Russia’s borders, not the other way around, and now NATO is bombing and threatening to bomb Russian cities.
After decades of unpopular wars of aggression in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, the NATO imperialist powers are planning a further, global escalation of war to subjugate Russia and prepare for war against China.
The NATO declaration is silent on the NATO-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, instead threatening Iran, North Korea and above all China for keeping ties with Russia. It states: “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine through its so-called ‘no limits’ partnership and its large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base. … The PRC cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.”
NATO’s move to threaten Russian cities with missile strikes and also threaten China must be taken as a warning: they are setting into motion a conflict in which workers and youth in the NATO countries themselves would also suffer catastrophic casualties.
Russian officials responded by condemning the Washington summit and threatening military countermeasures. “Tensions on the European continent are escalating,” warned Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Russia sees “NATO’s decisions to set up separate logistics centers in cities on the Black Sea, the opening of additional facilities in Europe,” he continued, calling it “a very serious threat to the national security of our country [requiring] thoughtful, coordinated and effective responses to deter and counter NATO.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov pledged to “first of all develop a military response to this new game,” the Interfax news agency reported.
This response exposes the bankruptcy of the corrupt Russian capitalist regime established by Stalinism’s dissolution of the Soviet Union. A military response to NATO’s threats—devising plans so Russian missile forces can rapidly bomb Berlin, London, Paris, Rome and Madrid—only brings the world one step closer to a catastrophic nuclear conflagration. The only progressive solution to the warmongering of NATO is the mobilization of the mass opposition to imperialist war in the working class in an international, socialist anti-war movement.