By Sabine Siebold
WIESBADEN, Germany (Reuters) - NATO will not be cowed by Russian threats but keep up its strong support of Kyiv, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on his first visit to the alliance's Ukraine mission in Wiesbaden, set to take over the coordination of military aid from the U.S.
"The message (to Russian President Vladimir Putin) is that we will continue, that we will do what's necessary to make sure that he will not get his way, that Ukraine will prevail," he told Reuters in a joint interview with German public radio Hessischer Rundfunk on Monday.
Rutte spoke at Clay Barracks, the U.S. base hosting the headquarters of the new mission, dubbed NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU), which will gradually assume the coordination of Western military aid to Kyiv.
The move is widely seen as an effort to safeguard the aid mechanism against a possible return of NATO critic Donald Trump to the White House. Republican Trump is running against Democrat Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 U.S. election. Diplomats, however, acknowledge that the handover of military aid coordination to NATO may have a limited effect given that the U.S. is NATO's dominant power and provides the majority of arms to Ukraine.
Speaking in one of 12 green tents that house NSATU as it is built up, Rutte earlier on Monday addressed allied troops from more than a dozen nations already working on the mission that will, at a later stage, move into a nearby hangar and be complemented by Ukrainian troops.
NSATU is expected to have a total strength of some 700 personnel, including troops stationed at NATO's military headquarters SHAPE in Belgium and at logistics hubs in Poland and Romania.
The Wiesbaden base is also home to the U.S. unit in charge of long-range missiles that Washington will deploy to Germany temporarily from 2026, to counter what both countries describe as a threat posed by Russian missiles stationed as close as Kaliningrad, some 500 kilometres (311 miles) from Berlin.
On his first visit to Germany as NATO chief, Rutte welcomed the step that has been denounced as a provocation by Russia and sparked a heated debate in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social-Democrat Party.
Rutte, who was prime minister of the Netherlands from 2010 until 2024, said it was crucial for NATO to have the full range of capabilities needed to deter a Russian threat.
"We are NATO. We are a defensive alliance, we are not offensive. We are not interested in capturing any part of any other country outside NATO territory," he said.
"As this democratic alliance, the strongest military alliance in world history, serving 1 billion people, we stand ready to confront any threat. We will never get intimidated by our adversaries."
U.S. President Joe Biden and Scholz announced the deployment of the missiles on the sidelines of the NATO summit in July, describing it as a stopgap solution until Germany, France and several other European countries have developed their own missiles with a similar range.