Over three million soldiers: is NATO militarily stronger than Russia?

Over three million soldiers
Is NATO militarily stronger than Russia?

By Andrea Sellmann and Mary Abdelaziz-Ditzow
07/20/2023, 10:11 am

For almost 17 months Ukraine defied the Russian war of aggression. NATO supports the country militarily, financially and economically. But on the battlefield, she does not stand by Selenskyj’s troops. How strong is NATO?

Morally, the matter is clear: the 31 member states of NATO position themselves firmly on the side of Ukraine. That became more than clear at the NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continued to hope in vain for a formal invitation to join the military alliance. There was nothing more than an assurance that Ukraine could become a NATO member after the end of the war.

Former NATO strategist Stefanie Babst criticized the Vilnius summit as a “strategic zero number”. She was hoping for at least one invitation to join talks, she says in the podcast “Wirtschaft Welt & Weit”. The meeting only signals the following to Russia: “It doesn’t really have to fear the presence of NATO.”

But how strong is the military alliance? NATO has more than three million soldiers, says Babst in the new podcast episode. “But that doesn’t mean, of course, that all of these armed forces are immediately fit for war and deployable.”

The alliance has “very convincing military capabilities” that it is willing to use only for its own defense. Even if there is no complete picture of the situation: purely numerically, the Russian armed forces are inferior to NATO in the conventional area. But Russia is also an aggressive nuclear power for the alliance – a fact that Putin repeatedly threatens to blackmail NATO and ultimately all of us.