Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen

The crisis in Ukraine has created a fundamentally new security situation in Europe. The transatlantic community is now faced with a revisionist power in Europe’s own backyard. Russia has shown that it is willing to use force to extend its influence and control over independent sovereign nations in blatant disregard of international law. From the onset, I have called the crisis a wake-up call. How Western democracies respond to it and reshape Euro-Atlantic security will be, I believe, the defining challenge of the next decade.