What’s behind NATO’s defense transformation?

The Kremlin has repeatedly warned against NATO’s militarization of Europe, which Moscow says poses a direct threat to Russia.

NATO "has put in place the most comprehensive defense plans since the Cold War, with currently more than 500,000 troops at high readiness," the alliance’s spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah has told CNN.

She added that NATO had undergone the most significant transformation in collective defense in a generation since 2014. So what is behind this push?

The alliance’s high readiness mode stipulates that the aforementioned forces can be deployed within 30 days in case of a possible armed conflict.

NATO has repeatedly cited an alleged Russian threat and Moscow’s ongoing special operation to justify the alliance’s defense transformation, which in particular envisages reintroducing compulsory military service in a number of NATO countries, such as Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

Moscow-based analyst Dmitry Suslov earlier told Sputnik that NATO commits itself to be able to deploy at least 300,000 troops in Central and Eastern Europe and is building military infrastructure in Poland, Romania, and other Central and Eastern European states under the pretext of a purported Russian threat.

Sean Monaghan, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in turn, said in an interview with CNN that NATO is struggling to meet its new goal of having 300,000 personnel ready to be activated within one month and another half a million available within six months.

Moscow has repeatedly warned against NATO's military buildup, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointing out that the alliance is "directly showing its determination to remain an enemy" to Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, told US journalist Tucker Carlson that Moscow is not going to attack NATO countries, because it doesn’t make any sense. Putin noted that Western politicians regularly single out an imaginary Russian threat in order to distract attention from domestic problems, but "smart people understand perfectly well that this is nothing but a fake."