General Alaudinov said NATO will no longer exist in its current form by 2029-2030, affirming that Russia will win Ukraine in the conflict.
“Russia will win in special operations and all battlefields,” Apti Alaudinov, commander of the Chechen Akhmat special force fighting in Ukraine and recently appointed to a senior position in the Russian Ministry of Defense, said in a statement—interview on Rossiya-1 TV channel on April 24. Special operations is the term Moscow uses to refer to the fighting in Ukraine.
General Alaudinov said Ukraine was completely exhausted on all fronts and needed constant funding to “continue to exist as a country.” However, he affirmed that no financial aid can help the enemy compensate for the loss of human resources.
“We will have to try until 2029-2030, but I can guarantee that as a result of the special operation, NATO will cease to exist in its current form,” he said. “Most countries that are blindly following the US will have to kneel and swear allegiance to Russia, asking to join our alliance.”
Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, said that General Alaudinov’s statement was a direct threat to the US-led military alliance. Alaudinov said, “Russia will wage a war in the rest of the decade and intends to destroy NATO,” the Ukrainian official wrote on social network X.
Russia-NATO tensions escalated after the conflict in Ukraine broke out at the end of February 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin said one of the reasons he launched the campaign was concerns about NATO’s expansion to the east.
Members of the bloc have actively supported Ukraine to fight Russia, the latest being an aid package worth nearly 61 billion USD that the US just announced. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on April 4 that Russia and NATO are in a state of “direct confrontation”, accusing the military alliance of causing instability.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last year that if Kyiv was defeated by Moscow, Putin would continue to send troops into NATO member Poland, which could lead to World War III.
However, President Putin in March affirmed that Russia would not attack the NATO country. “Accusations that we intend to attack Europe after Ukraine are completely meaningless,” Putin said, noting that the US defense budget is currently 10 times higher than Russia’s. “In that context, would we launch a war against NATO? That would be absurd.”
However, Russia’s leader once warned that the country was ready to use nuclear weapons to protect “territorial integrity”, affirming that this was “not empty talk”. In his State of the Union Message on February 29, Mr. Putin emphasized that the country’s strategic nuclear forces are in a state of combat readiness.
This year, NATO celebrates its 75th anniversary. The prospect of former US President Donald Trump returning to the White House is weighing heavily on the bloc’s future. During his term, Trump publicly announced his intention to withdraw the US from NATO, saying that this alliance had become a burden for Washington. He also revealed that he once threatened to encourage Russia to “do whatever they want” with NATO allies that do not meet the bloc’s defense spending requirements.
General Alaudinov is an ally of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and President Putin. Novaya Gazeta, a Russian-language newspaper based in Latvia, evaluated him as a potential candidate to replace Kadyrov, who was said to have been diagnosed with pancreatitis in 2019. The newspaper reported that information about Kadyrov’s illness ” is pushing the Kremlin to find a successor.”
Amid rumors about his health, on April 22, the Chechen leader posted a video of himself exercising, pushing weights and wrestling in the gym, seemingly to quell the speculation.
