The Minister of Defense of Lithuania, Robertas Kaunas, defended this Wednesday that NATO must articulate a joint and "equivalent" reaction to the hybrid attacks coming from Russia, urging that the Alliance also act in "the gray zone".
"Currently, we have a problem that Russia is not going to solve. This means that we, as an organization of NATO, must be able to fight and give an equivalent response in that gray zone, in the face of the threats we are facing today," said the Baltic Defense official, according to the LRT network.
In this context, he described Russia as a "terrorist state" while recalling that Germany has pointed it out as responsible for "an attempt to commit a terrorist act".
Kaunas indicated that, within NATO, allies express "increasingly with greater force and clarity" the risk that Russia poses, and he called for taking one more step to "prepare a unified response to such threats".
Germany linked this Tuesday the hybrid attack recorded at Leipzig airport, at the beginning of August, with Moscow. In reaction, Berlin has ordered the closure of the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and has rejected that this decision has electoral purposes, as suggested by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has accused the German authorities of fabricating evidence.