Italian Member of the European Parliament Roberto Vannacci confronted NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte before the EP Committee on Foreign Affairs and Subcommittee on Security and Defense on Jan. 13. Rutte had said that NATO should raise its current 2% of GDP defense spending goal, or the allies can begin taking “Russian language courses or move to New Zealand.” In order to achieve the spending targets, Rutte called for cutting on social expenses and squeezing budgets: “Spending more on defense means spending less on other priorities, but it can make a big difference for our future security. On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems, and we need only a small fraction of that money to make defense much stronger,” he said.
Vannacci did not let it go. “On March 5, 2023” he said, confronting Rutte, “a British intelligence update told us how the Russians were fighting with shovels due to shortage of ammunition. The chairwoman of the Commission, von der Leyen, has often told us how the Russians were stealing electronic boards from Ukrainian washing machines and sending them to Russia in order to use them for their weapons systems, and NATO tells us every day about the huge Russian casualties increasing by 1,500. Now, in this situation of Russia’s obvious crisis against a modest country like Ukraine, and especially taking into account that Europe spends €314 billion in a market regime while Russia spends €140 billion on defense in a war regime, can you explain why in three or four years Russia should attack a NATO country and why we should spend more on defense?”
(Vannacci is a former general of the Italian Army, who was elected with a half-million votes in the Lega slate in the last European elections, perhaps the largest number of votes for a single candidate to the EP. He is now a member of the Patriots for Europe faction.)
Rutte did not answer Vannacci, but insisted, during his replies, that Russia is producing more military equipment than NATO altogether. “When you look what Russia is producing now in three months, it’s what all of NATO is producing from Los Angeles up to Ankara in a full year, and then Russia is not bigger than the Netherlands and Belgium combined as an economy, the two of you together is the Russian economy, and they’re producing in three months what the whole of NATO is producing in the year.”
