NATO to Putin: Don’t even think about messing with eastern allies

LISBON, Portugal — NATO sent a blunt message to Moscow on Friday: If you even think about attacking one of our members, you will face the full might of the United States and all its European allies.

Backing up its works, leaders of the 28 NATO members agreed to create a "spearhead force" of several thousand elite troops primed to deploy at short notice to defend eastern allies such as Poland and the Baltic states who are feeling vulnerable in the face of Russia's attack on Ukraine.

"NATO protects all allies, at all times," NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters at an alliance summit in Wales. "Should you even think of attacking one ally, you will be facing the whole alliance."

Decisions taken at the Wales summit have confirmed the alliance’s return to its core function of ensuring the collective defense of its members' territories after years when the focus has been on projecting security through "out-of-area" operations like those in Afghanistan, the Balkans and Libya.

Although Fogh Rasmussen and other NATO leaders insist the new stance doesn’t represent a return to a Cold War-style standoff with Moscow, it's become difficult to view the relationship between Russia and the West in any other terms.

The announcement of a ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed insurgents that took effect on Friday and appeared to hold during its early hours raised some hopes of a de-escalation, but many Western officials remain dubious.

Some view peace talks, which took place in Belarus, as a smokescreen by Russian President Vladimir Putin to undermine Western unity at the NATO summit and defer the expected announcement later on Friday of more international sanctions.

Reports from European Union headquarters in Brussels suggested the application of new sanctions could be put off until next week to give Russia time to show it's serious about the proposed cease-fire.

However, Britain's Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond insisted the EU would announce more punitive economic measures as planned on Friday, saying they could always be lifted if Russia shows good faith.

"It is important to go ahead with the plans for increased sanctions, which will be discussed when the EU meets later today,” he said in a statement. “If Russia ends up in an economic war, it will lose."

"Of course if there is a plan and it is implemented then we can lift the sanctions off, but there is a great deal of skepticism as to whether this ceasefire is real," he said from Wales.

Washington is also preparing new sanctions.

President Barack Obama told reporters at the summit that previous measures as well as the threat of new ones were responsible for Friday’s ceasefire. “Today the United States and Europe are finalizing measures to deepen and broaden our sanctions across Russia's financial, energy and defense sectors," he said.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said the sanctions under discussion in Brussels will be "very tough,” but leaked drafts suggested they will likely be watered down from the hard measures suggested by Britain and other more gung-ho EU members.

London's proposal to eject Russian banks from the SWIFT system of international money transfers was not in a draft of the new measures leaked to reporters in Brussels. Nor was any mention of a boycott of the 2018 soccer World Cup due to be hosted by Russia.

Instead, the proposals focus on cranking up existing restrictions on Russia's banking, oil and defense sectors. Russian state-owned oil and defense companies would be banned from raising funds in Europe and restrictions on access to capital markets by Russian banks would be tightened.

Sales of technology to the oil industry are expected to be further restricted, along with the sale of so-called "dual-use" technologies that may have military applications.

Russia's vital natural gas sector looks likely to escape any sanctions because European countries are fearful Putin could retaliate by cutting off the gas supplies they rely on to heat homes and power industry.

The more cautious European allies also ensured the NATO summit stopped short of agreeing to permanently station a large number of troops on the alliance's eastern borders.

As an alternative, NATO will position weapons, ammunition and other equipment at forward bases in eastern members and set up command posts and logistic centers for its new rapid reaction forces to quickly deploy in a crisis.

Fogh Rasmussen said Poland, Romania and the Baltic states had expressed an interest in hosting such bases. Non-NATO nations Finland and Sweden signed agreements to facilitate the hosting of allied forces.

Britain has agreed to provide a quarter of the troops for the first rotation of the around 4,000-strong spearhead force. Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and the Baltic states are also expected to contribute.

"As Russia tramples illegally over Ukraine, we must reassure our Eastern European members that we will always uphold our… commitments to collective self-defense," British Prime Minister David Cameron said in Wales. "Our great alliance must now evolve and refocus on the new capabilities that we need to keep our people safe."

The force is designed to act as first line of defense to resist until larger NATO forces arrive. NATO's top commander, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, has said its deployment could be triggered by the sort of covert destabilization that Russia used in the early stages of its Ukraine action.

Reports on Friday that an Estonian security officer had been abducted close to the border and taken to Russia provided an ominous echo of those subversive tactics.

More from GlobalPost: The West is raising the stakes over Ukraine

NATO officials have given assurances that alliance commanders will have leeway to deploy the force when needed, avoiding decisions on its use being bogged down by political differences among the allies should a crisis erupt.

On paper, at least, NATO's conventional forces still outgun Russia's despite Putin's massive investment in defense in recent years and the steady decline in military spending by European members of NATO since the end of the Cold War.

The NATO leaders agreed on Friday to reverse that decline and work toward achieving their target of spending at least 2 percent of economic output with a decade. Currently, only Estonia, Britain, Greece and the United States achieve that benchmark.

However, NATO’s weakness lies less in the number and quality of forces at its disposal than on whether its member nations have the political will to use them. Many allies will be hoping against hope that Friday's ceasefire could mark the start of a genuine de-escalation that ensure their will won't be put to the test.