Denmark wants huge hike in military budget ‘to deter Russia’

The Danish government aims to increase its military spending to counter an alleged security threat from Russia in Eastern Europe.

During a visit to the Danish Air Force team in Lithuania on Monday, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said his center-right minority government needed to persuade the Danish parliament next month to back a proposed, whopping 20-percent hike in Denmark’s military budget over a five-year period.

“We want to look at ourselves as a core NATO member. And in order to behave like such a member, we need to increase our expenditures,” Rasmussen said.

An agreement made in 2006 calls on NATO member countries to have a military spending of at least two percent of their GDP. While many members of the military alliance have refused to allocate that percentage of their GDP to the military, some have recently been invoking the agreement in an ostensible attempt to deter Russia.

The Danish prime minister said his country’s military budget needed a “substantial increase.”

“Five years ago we thought that the defense line, so to speak, would not be in Europe, but would be international operations. Now we realize that we need to have the capability to do both,” he added.

The brandishing of a “Russian threat” comes while NATO member states have significantly increased their military activities near Russia’s western borders in recent years.

Last week, Denmark deployed 200 troops to a UK-led NATO mission in Estonia, citing the alleged threat from Russia. NATO has deployed around 4,000 troops, consisting of four battle groups, to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland — all near Russian borders — in recent years.

Russia, realizing that security threat under its nose, has held several military drills to maintain preparedness. The NATO countries have then referred to those drills as signs that Russia has aggressive and not defensive intentions.

NATO — largely made up of Western European countries — also accuses Russia of having a hand in the crisis in Ukraine, which Moscow denies.

Eastern Ukraine has been the site of a conflict since 2014, when the government in Kiev started a crackdown on pro-Russia protests in the country. Earlier that same year, the Crimean Peninsula, then Ukrainian territory, voted in a referendum to separate from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Western countries branded the subsequent unification as an “annexation” of the territory by Russia, and Ukraine soon confronted pro-Russia protests elsewhere — in its eastern Donbass region — with a heavy hand.

The crisis in the Donbass soon turned into an armed conflict, which has so far left over 10,000 people dead and more than a million others displaced. Western countries have blamed Russia, which denies any involvement.

“Russia’s behavior has created an unpredictable and unstable security environment in the Baltic Sea region,” Lokke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, said at a joint news conference with Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis in the capital, Riga.

“Given the Russian aggression and what happened in Crimea, I think we simply have to be realistic about things and invest more in our security,” he said.

Earlier this week, Moscow deployed a new regiment of its advanced S-400 air defense missile system to Crimea, the second such deployment on the Black Sea peninsula after a first one in the spring of 2017 near the port town of Fedosia.

The new division was reportedly based next to the town of Sevastopol and would control the airspace over the border with Ukraine.

The S-400 is a defensive missile system that can intercept incoming missiles and invading aircraft.

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