DISINFO: NATO summit evokes terror tales about Russia to justify military expenditure
SUMMARY
NATO leaders need terror tales about Russia’s supposed threat to justify their plans to further increase the alliance's capabilities and increase its members' military budgets. At the next NATO summit, the launch of a large-scale program to further increase the alliance's capabilities is planned. To implement it, the military budgets of NATO countries will be increased. So it is clear that the Atlantic Alliance is the one truly causing global militarisation and the arms race. To justify their plans, the alliance leaders once again insist on some kind of threat from Russia, some kind of possible invasion of Europe by Moscow. They themselves invented this scare story and repeat it year after year to deceive their own people and extort money from them.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation against NATO and portraying Russia as an innocent actor, opportunistically exploiting the NATO 2025 Summit in The Netherlands to blame the Atlantic Alliance and deflect any Russian responsibility for rising global tensions.
The ongoing increase in defence spending across NATO is explained by Russia’s aggressive actions, such as the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas and the 2022 large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s threat is not a “terror tale” but a very real one, as proven by the dozens of sabotage operations it has carried out throughout the continent in the last years, and its attempts to destabilise multiple countries through electoral interference, cyberattacks and other hybrid actions.
Russia has been rearming for some years at a much faster pace than NATO. The country’s military expenditure reached over 6.7% of its GDP in 2025, over 40% more than the previous year. That is 32% of its total budget for the year. However, this disinformation story ignores all these elements, creating a grossly distorted picture that it uses to advance several recurring pro-Kremlin narratives against NATO.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that the EU arms itself using the phantom threat of a war and Russia’s imaginary menace, that Europe justifies the increasing defence budgets with “belligerent” Moscow, that ‘Russia’s threat’ is an attempt to justify increasing military expenditure in Europe, that ReArm Europe means the EU is preparing to attack Russia, or that the EU is not capable of peace, it is only interested in waging war.