DefMin Dincu: Russia has a plan to strengthen military posture; future aggression possible against Hungary

The Minister of National Defence, Vasile Dincu, said on Thursday that Russia has a "comprehensive plan" to strengthen its military presence in the region, with significant potential for aggression against Ukraine, agerpres reports.

The clarifications were made at the beginning of the anniversary edition of the Bucharest Forum 2021, an event organized by the Aspen Romania Institute together with the Bucharest office of the German Marshall Fund of the US.

"The current security situation on NATO's eastern flank is worrying, volatile and poses a number of significant risks. Russia has a comprehensive plan to strengthen its military stance and assertive behaviour in the region, with a significant possibility of aggression against one of our neighbouring states, a states in our proximity, Ukraine. We are facing hybrid threats, such as the influx of migrants from Belarus, and we must also respond to threats from potential global adversaries, such as China. Let's not forget the impact brought by the climate change on society, which has become a rather important threat," Dincu said.

According to him, Romania wants NATO's new strategic concept to strengthen the alliance's role as an "essential" organization in managing the specific challenges of an "international context marked by competition" between the great powers.

"We will propose to advance a realistic description of the security environment. Russia should be reflected as a potential serious threat to NATO from a military perspective. The old concept of dialogue and deterrence is not losing its relevance at the moment. Obviously, dialogue must remain the main form and it must be strengthened, but we have seen that, although NATO has been working on this concept for a decade, it has not yielded - at this point, as we can all see - the expected results, at least not in the medium term; maybe only at the beginning," the Minister of Defence also said.

Dincu added that our country also wants the new strategic concept to emphasize the "essential role" of collective defence.

"It should be focused on the transatlantic relationship and the allies' commitment to NATO. The NATO Secretary General also said this: I believe that this Europe-US axis is very important at the moment. We would like to project stability through the capabilities consolidation mechanism, especially in the vulnerable regions of the alliance, namely: Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans and the southern area," he said.

In his view, the new strategic concept must focus on the NATO-EU relationship, adding that "complementarity, not competition, no segmentation" of the two's efforts is needed.

Vasile Dincu has noticed in the last decade a phenomenon of "acceleration of history," because in this interval there have been changes "which, perhaps, used to happen in 30 or 50 years."

He underscored that NATO is "a strong alliance", "the most successful political and military alliance in the world," which proved its ability to "adapt quickly to all kinds of threats and provide real security."