NATO’s summit in Madrid will next week decide on the Alliance’s largest military deployment since the Cold War.

Spanish newspaper El País reported this.

The publication notes that in this way, NATO wants to demonstrate that it is adapting to the new threats.

NATO Allies are ready to turn Eastern Europe into a fort with thousands of soldiers and a large amount of deployed military equipment.

The Alliance wants to send a clear message that it is on alert and can respond to the aggression against any country.

They are also considering, among other things, encouraging allies to increase their military budgets.

Sources in the publication say that there are countries that are ready to move “from presence in the east of the Alliance in form of the combat groups to the combat brigades.”

As of now, these units account from 1 to 1.6 thousand soldiers. Reformatting the presence into brigade format will be able to at least double this number. These changes would include the provision of more modern arms.

El País also emphasizes that some of the allied countries are even raising the issue of placing divisions under the command of generals. That would mean a contingent of up to 15 thousand troops.

The Strategic Concept will be adopted at the NATO Summit in Madrid. The new document is expected to put an end to NATO-Russia relations. Moscow would likely be identified as a direct threat to the Alliance.

As previously reported, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda called for an increase of NATO’s presence in the Baltics States.

He stressed that Belarus is undergoing “extreme fundamental changes” that are making Lithuania more vulnerable to Russia’s rapid attack.

Nauseda noted that today’s Belarus is easier to be called an additional “province of Moscow” since the Russian army there can do virtually anything, including placing the equipment and repositioning forces.

The new reality, according to the President of Lithuania, requires an adequate response from the Alliance, since Russian troops can easily appear in close proximity to the Lithuanian border.