Russia has plans to test NATO's resolve, German intelligence chief warns

By Thomas Escritt

BERLIN (Reuters) -Russia is determined to test the resolve of the NATO alliance, including by extending its confrontation with the West beyond the borders of Ukraine, the Germany's foreign intelligence chief told the Table Media news organization.

Bruno Kahl, head of the Federal Intelligence Service, said his agency had clear intelligence indications that Russian officials believed the collective defence obligations enshrined in the NATO treaty no longer had practical force.

"We are quite certain, and we have intelligence showing it, that Ukraine is only a step on the journey westward," Kahl told Table Media in a podcast interview.

"That doesn't mean we expect tank armies to roll westwards," he added. "But we see that NATO's collective defence promise is to be tested."

Germany, already the second-largest provider of armaments and financial support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, has pledged to step up its support further under the new government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, promising to help Ukraine develop new missiles that could strike deep into Russian territory.

Without detailing the nature of his intelligence sources, Kahl said Russian officials were envisaging confrontations that fell short of a full military engagement that would test whether the U.S. would really live up to its mutual aid obligations under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.

"They don't need to dispatch armies of tanks for that," he said. "It's enough to send little green men to Estonia to protect supposedly oppressed Russian minorities."

Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea involved occupation of buildings and offices by Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms and civilian clothes, who came to be known as the "little green men" when Moscow initially denied their identity.

Kahl did not specify which officials in Moscow were thinking along these lines.

Merz, who visited Donald Trump in Washington last week, pushed back against the U.S. president's assertion that Ukraine and Russia were like two infants fighting, telling Trump that where Ukraine targeted Moscow's military, Russia bombed Ukraine's cities.

Kahl said his contacts with U.S. counterparts had left him convinced they took the Russian threat seriously.

"They take it as seriously as us, thank God," he said.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt, editing by Deepa Babington)