DISINFO: Stoltenberg admits that NATO feeds the conflict in Ukraine to promote weapons sales
SUMMARY
Openly and shamelessly, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expressed something that shows clearly one of the true reasons of the Atlantic Alliance to continue feeding the conflict in Ukraine: weapons sales. During an intervention at the European Parliament, he said: “What is really important is to sign contracts [with the military industry]. We need nations to sign contracts because this enables the industry to invest and ramp up production”.
RESPONSE
This is a disingenuous distortion of the original statement of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
This piece of disinformation crucially omits Stoltenberg’s previous remarks, in which he stated: “We depleted our stocks to provide support to Ukraine. But our stocks are not big enough. So we need to ramp up production. The reality is that our production capacity is not as big as it should be”.
This provides a proper contextualization, showing that Stoltenberg’s focus was on increasing military production in order to be able to help Ukraine and not, as this disinformation story claims, in promoting weapons sales.
The goal of this disinformation story is to blame NATO for the prosecution of the war in Ukraine, attempting to justify Russia’s brutal invasion of the country. By framing international backing for Ukraine’s self defence as a mere matter of “selling weapons”, it also aims to erode popular support for this aid.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that NATO profits greatly from the conflict in Ukraine, that the US is prolonging war in Ukraine to benefit from weapons sales, that Western military aid to Ukraine only will cause more suffering, that US aid to Ukraine will only prolong the agony of Zelenskyy’s regime, or that the West kills Ukrainians by sending them weapons they don’t know how to use.