Earlier this week Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken issued some stark – and some might say, irresponsible – words directed at Moscow, warning that any missile strike on Brussels would trigger an overwhelming NATO response.
“If Putin launches a missile at Brussels, we will wipe Moscow off the map,” Francken told the De Morgen daily on Monday. It’s unclear what precisely prompted such an aggressive warning, coming after Russia’s own ‘red line’ type rhetoric seeking to dissuade Washington from arming Kiev with long-range Tomahawk missiles.
Franckena further said that any conventional attack on Brussels would also result in Moscow getting “flattened.”
Again, the words were ultra-provocative given it is only one country currently seeing its territory regularly attacked with the help of NATO, and that’s Russia.
When asked in the interview about European doubts concerning Trump’s commitment to NATO, Franckena responded, “The bias against the American government is so great in Europe. Unbelievable…He literally said that America will continue to support its NATO allies one hundred percent. A cruise missile on Brussels? That’s a no-brainer, whatever definition you use. Putin won’t do that either.”
“I consider a major Russian attack on the Baltic states less likely. Those are NATO member states, after all. Soon we’ll have six hundred F-35s in Europe: the Russians are afraid of them because they can’t see them,” he added.
In response, the Russian Embassy in Belgium promptly condemned Francken’s “provocative and irresponsible” statements as “sheer absurdity and total disconnect from reality.”
As quoted in state media, the embassy said further:
“Francken’s escapades are the most glaring manifestation of the militarist frenzy that is increasingly consuming the European war party,” the embassy said.
It added that EU officials like Francken are “posing a threat to the continent’s future and [are] capable of plunging it into a new war.”
And separately, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko said Wednesday that Francken’s words were in line with “the atmosphere of military psychosis” which now dominates discourse in Western Europe.
Moscow has been repeatedly warning that long-range Western-supplied missiles on Russian territory will change the nature of the conflict, and that runaway escalation with NATO could be the result.
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