One of Germany’s highest-ranking generals is desperately working to prepare his country for a Russian attack within the next two to three years.
Lieutenant General Gerald Funke, the head of the German armed forces support command (UstgKdoBw), told The Times that Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ is his biggest concern, along with casualties.
‘Whereas in Afghanistan I had a regrettably high but manageable number of wounded, I now have to plan for the possibility of a thousand injured personnel a day, ‘he said.
‘The closer you look at it, the more complex it becomes and the harder it is to imagine.’
He added: ‘What worries me … at the moment is the hybrid side, the covert side: sabotage, sleeper cells, some kind of targeted attacks.
‘I can’t rule out the use of long-range missiles. But I think the hybrid threat is very high.’
This is the latest in a slew of warnings from top defence officials over the mounting threat from Russia.
In December, each of the 32 Nato member countries – including Britain – was warned to prepare for a war on a scale ‘our grandparents and great-grandparents endured’.
Nato chief Mark Rutte urged allies to step up their defence efforts to prevent a war waged by Russia.
In a speech in Berlin, he said that too many allies do not feel the urgency of the threat in Europe and that they must rapidly increase defence spending and production to prevent a war on the scale of that seen by past generations.
‘We are Russia’s next target. I fear that too many are quietly complacent,’ he warned.
Another expert has warned that the United Kingdom is already in conflict with Russia – and has been ‘for years’, but isn’t willing to admit it.
Keir Giles, a Russia expert at international affairs thinktank, Chatham House, previously told Metro: ‘There’s a growing realisation that all of these adjectives applied to war, whether it’s ‘hybrid’ or ‘subthreshold’ war, or even ‘hidden war’ are convenient – because they allow government authorities to maintain the fictional idea that Russia is not waging war on us.
‘Because if you simply call it war, that means you have to do something about it.’
Giles stressed recent events point to a ‘subsurface conflict’ which has been going on for more than a decade, which most UK citizens aren’t aware of.
Between August 2023 and March 2024 alone, 46,000 flights in areas such as the Baltic, Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean logged interference issues – believed to be due to Russian interference.
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