North Korean troops on European soil is dangerous expansion of conflict - NATO

He wrote about this in a column for Politico.

According to Rutte, Russia has resorted to asking North Korea for help out of desperation, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin is failing to achieve his strategic goals in Ukraine.

‘This dangerous expansion of the conflict escalates the war and demonstrates that our security is not regional, it is global,’ the NATO Secretary General said.

In his opinion, the EU should increase its support for Ukraine.

‘We need to raise the cost for Putin and his enabling authoritarian friends. We also need to invest more in our relationship with our Indo-Pacific partners. That means more consultation, more intelligence-sharing — like we did last week — and more practical and political cooperation, including on defense production,’ Rutte wrote.

He reminded that support for Ukraine costs only a fraction of the annual military budgets of NATO countries and allies and amounts to less than 1% of annual GDP.

‘That’s a small price to pay for peace,’ the NATO Secretary General stressed.

• On November 5, Ukraine's Defense Minister Rustem Umerov announced that the first military clash between Ukrainian soldiers and North Korean troops fighting on the side of the occupiers took place in the Kursk region of Russia.