One in every of Germany’s highest-ranking generals is desperately working to arrange his country for a Russian attack inside the subsequent two to a few years.
Lieutenant General Gerald Funke, the top of the German armed forces support command (UstgKdoBw), told The Times that Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ is his biggest concern, together with casualties.
‘Whereas in Afghanistan I had a regrettably high but manageable variety of wounded, I now must plan for the opportunity of a thousand injured personnel a day, ‘he said.
‘The closer you have a look at it, the more complex it becomes and the harder it’s to assume.’
He added: ‘What worries me … in the meanwhile is the hybrid side, the covert side: sabotage, sleeper cells, some form of targeted attacks.
‘I can’t rule out the usage of long-range missiles. But I feel the hybrid threat may be very high.’
That is the most recent in a slew of warnings from top defence officials over the mounting threat from Russia.
In December, each of the 32 Nato member countries – including Britain – was warned to arrange for a war on a scale ‘our grandparents and great-grandparents endured’.
Nato chief Mark Rutte urged allies to step up their defence efforts to stop a war waged by Russia.
In a speech in Berlin, he said that too many allies don’t feel the urgency of the threat in Europe and that they need to rapidly increase defence spending and production to stop a war on the dimensions of that seen by past generations.
‘We’re Russia’s next goal. I fear that too many are quietly complacent,’ he warned.
One other expert has warned that the UK is already in conflict with Russia – and has been ‘for years’, but isn’t willing to confess it.
Keir Giles, a Russia expert at international affairs thinktank, Chatham House, previously told Metro: ‘There’s a growing realisation that each one of those adjectives applied to war, whether it’s ‘hybrid’ or ‘subthreshold’ war, and even ‘hidden war’ are convenient – because they permit government authorities to take care of the fictional concept that Russia is just not waging war on us.
‘Because if you happen to simply call it war, meaning you’ve got to do something about it.’
Giles stressed recent events point to a ‘subsurface conflict’ which has been happening for greater than a decade, which most UK residents aren’t aware of.
Between August 2023 and March 2024 alone, 46,000 flights in areas comparable to the Baltic, Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean logged interference issues – believed to be on account of Russian interference.
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