NATO Secretary-General and former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte underlined the need for transatlantic cooperation in the defense industry to meet the challenge of rearmament during the NATO Summit in the Netherlands on Tuesday.
"Today, NATO's military edge is being aggressively challenged by a rapidly rearming Russia, backed by Chinese technology and armed with Iranian and North Korean weapons," he said.
"Only Europe and North America together can rise up to meet the challenge of rearmament," Rutte added.
The US leadership was committed to NATO, Rutte asserted. He noted, however, that this came with an expectation that European countries and Canada spend more on defense.
The Kremlin accused NATO of being on a path of rampant militarisation and portraying Russia as a "fiend of hell" in order to justify its big increase in defense spending.
The summit and its final statement will be focused on heeding US President Donald Trump's call to spend 5% of GDP on defense - a significant jump from the current 2% goal. It is to be achieved both by spending more on military items and by including broader security-related spending in the new target.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged NATO countries to support Ukraine's defense industry, speaking before a summit that is likely to heed US calls to sign off a big new spending goal for the alliance.
Trump, en route to the summit in the Netherlands, singled out Spain for criticism after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declared Madrid did not need to meet the spending target that the Americans have been demanding.
The two-day gathering is intended to signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin that NATO is united, despite Trump's previous criticism of the alliance, and determined to expand and upgrade its defenses to deter any attack from Moscow.
Trump, Zelensky are set to meet
Trump is expected to meet Zelensky for talks at some point during the summit in the Dutch city of The Hague.
Zelensky said it was essential that Ukraine lead in drone technology, which has shaped the battlefield and developed at breathtaking pace in the 40 months the war has lasted so far.
"Please, let's make sure that our defense potential and potential of our partners work for our peace, not for Russia's madness," he said.
However, the war between Israel and Iran and the uncertain status of a ceasefire make the summit much less predictable than Rutte - hosting the gathering in his home city - and other NATO member countries would like.
Russia has cited its neighbor's desire to join the US-led transatlantic defense pact as one of the reasons why it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
NATO was founded by 12 Western countries in 1949 to resist the threat from the communist Soviet Union.
Russia denies any plan to attack the alliance, which now boasts 32 members, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was "largely a wasted effort" to assure the grouping of this because it was determined to demonize Russia.
"It is an alliance created for confrontation...It is not an instrument of peace and stability," he said.