Nato chief eyes bigger defence budgets and hard spending target

Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg opens the North Atlantic Council round table meeting of Nato defence ministers at Nato headquarters in Brussels (Olivier Matthys/AP)

Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has urged the 30 member countries to commit to spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defence by a set date, as Russia’s war on Ukraine and other threats eat into military spending.

Nato allies agreed in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, to halt the spending cuts they had made after the Cold War and move towards spending 2% of GDP on their defence budgets by 2024.