Time to stop defense cuts, NATO tells East Europeans

By Jan Lopatka and Jakub Iglewski BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - NATO members in Central and Eastern Europe need to beef up defense spending after cutting it for the past five years while Russia has sharply increased its military budget, the head of the Western alliance said on Thursday. NATO and its leading power, the United States, have long been urging reluctant members to spend more, but the issue has taken on new significance since Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March. \"Russian defense spending has grown by more than 10 percent in real terms each year over the past five years,\" NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a security conference in Slovakia, one of four alliance members - with Poland, Hungary and Romania - that share a border with Ukraine. Read More http://ift.tt/1iX6Dxp