BRUSSELS (HRNW) – NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg urged member countries to speed up increases in defence spending as new figures showed fewer than a quarter of them meeting the alliance’s target.
Stoltenberg said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year showed the world had become more dangerous, and NATO allies had to respond by setting and meeting more ambitious military spending goals.
Seven of the alliance’s 30 countries met the current goal of spending 2% of GDP on defence in 2022 – one fewer than in 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – according to estimates in the NATO secretary-general’s annual report, released on Tuesday.
Stoltenberg said NATO had expected two more members to hit the target but their economies had grown by more than anticipated so their spending came in lower as a share of GDP.
NATO members have been steadily increasing their defence spending overall since Russian forces annexed Crimea and entered Donbas in eastern Ukraine in 2014. But Stoltenberg said last year’s full-scale invasion showed a need to spend more.
“There’s no doubt that we need to do more and we need to do it faster,” he told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels.