CERNOBBIO, Italy, Sept 5 (Reuters) – NATO members should not tolerate deliberate actions of hybrid war, \u200cand the United States will stand by \u200ccountries as they deal with these incidents, Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. \u200bambassador to NATO, said on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Whitaker said last month’s attempted drone attack at Germany’s Leipzig\/Halle Airport, which Berlin has blamed on Russia, was more worrying than \u200cother recent incidents \u2060NATO members have faced due to Russian drones targeting Ukraine that strayed off course.<\/p>\n
“Then \u2060you have what I would call the more concerning hybrid actions like we saw in Leipzig, like \u200bwe have \u200bseen in Poland,” Whitaker \u200bsaid speaking on the \u200csidelines of a business conference in Italy.<\/p>\n
NATO members must be prepared, vigilant and also deliver a strong message when they are challenged by these events, he said.<\/p>\n
“If we can identify who’s doing it \u2014 which \u200cGermany did \u2014 we make sure \u200bwe express strongly that is \u200bunacceptable and we \u200bwill not tolerate it,” Whitaker said.<\/p>\n
Critical \u200cinfrastructure, including energy assets, could \u200bbe targeted and \u200bshould be monitored by national authorities, he added.<\/p>\n
The response to these challenges is primarily national, \u200bbut the United \u200cStates supports countries when they are dealing \u200bwith these acts, he said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Francesca Landini; \u200bEditing by Sharon Singleton)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CERNOBBIO, Italy, Sept 5 (Reuters) – NATO members should not tolerate deliberate actions of hybrid war, \u200cand the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7922,7923,182,7625,3497,7,1132,7845,7849],"class_list":["post-13201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-cernobbio","tag-germanys-leipzig-halle-airport","tag-italy","tag-leipzig","tag-matthew-whitaker","tag-nato","tag-reuters","tag-whitaker","tag-whitaker-said"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}