US to boost troop level in Europe as NATO unveils expansion

Putin warns Russia will respond if NATO sets up infrastructure in Finland, Sweden

The United States vowed Wednesday to reinforce Europe’s defenses in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as NATO declared Moscow the West’s greatest threat — prompting Vladimir Putin to lash out at the alliance’s “imperial ambitions.”

Meeting in Madrid, NATO leaders said Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

This came as NATO welcomed Sweden and Finland as invitees to join the alliance, and U.S. President Joe Biden announced new deployments of U.S. troops, ships and planes.

Biden boasted that the U.S. move was exactly what Putin “didn’t want” — and Moscow, facing fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces equipped with Western arms, reacted with predictable fury.

Putin accused the alliance of seeking to assert its “supremacy,” telling journalists in the Turkmenistan capital of Ashgabat that Ukraine and its people are “a means” for NATO to “defend their own interests.”

“The NATO countries’ leaders wish to… assert their supremacy, their imperial ambitions,” the Russian president added.

However, “if military contingents and military infrastructure were deployed there, we would be obliged to respond symmetrically and raise the same threats for those territories where threats have arisen for us,” Putin said.

NATO leaders have funneled billions of dollars of arms to Ukraine and faced a renewed appeal from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for more long-range artillery.

“Ukraine can count on us for as long as it takes,” NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said, announcing a new NATO strategic overview that focuses on the Moscow threat.

The document, updated for the first time since 2010, warned that the alliance “cannot discount the possibility” of an attack on its members.

“Today in Madrid, NATO proved it can take difficult but essential decisions. We welcome a cleareyed stance on Russia, as well as the accession for Finland and Sweden,” Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

Sweden and Finland, which abandoned decades of military non-alignment in response to the invasion to seek NATO membership, were officially invited in Wednesday.

Putin dismissed the move as “no problem.”

“We don’t have problems with Sweden and Finland like we do with Ukraine … They can join whatever they want,” he said in Ashgabat.

In Ukraine, officials said that Russian missiles had hit civilian housing and businesses in and around the cities of Dnipro, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv, leaving at least seven dead and 14 wounded.

The Russian defense ministry said the Kharkiv attack had hit Ukrainian command centers and a training base for foreign “mercenaries.”

And it said it had inflicted severe casualties on Ukrainian troops defending the town of Lysychansk in Luhansk, one of the two provinces that make up the large eastern Donbas region.

The frequency of the shelling there is “enormous,” the regional governor of Luhansk, Sergiy Gaiday, said in televised comments Wednesday, adding that the evacuation of some 15,000 civilians still in the city “might be dangerous at the moment.”

Luhansk and Donetsk, also in the Donbas, are breakaway states that have escaped Kyiv’s control since 2014.

Moscow recognized their independence in February — and on Wednesday Russia’s ally Syria became the only other nation to do so.

The move prompted Zelenskyy to immediately break off ties with Damascus.

“There will no longer be relations between Ukraine and Syria,” he said in a video posted on Telegram.