NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg advocates for Ukraine's right to use Western weapons to strike Russia @ScottRitter

Sputnik has spoken to experts to answer the burning question: Is NATO bracing for a full-scale war with Russia?

✅ Scott Ritter, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer: It's important to draw a distinction between official NATO policies and what have increasingly become the independent statements of a NATO secretary general who is divorced from reality.

✅ Michael Maloof, former Pentagon senior security policy analyst : So who's calling the shots? It's not coming from the US. Is there some other element that is pushing this agenda to go after Russia? Well, yeah. It's those entities and those ideologies, such as the World Economic Forum that see Russia against its globalist tendencies and globalist goals. And this is probably where it's all heading. These are the people with the money, with the influence, with the control over mass media. These are the folks that are guiding countries such as even the United States and certainly Great Britain.

✅ Larry Johnson, retired CIA intelligence officer and State Department official: Russia will take appropriate steps to counter. And as Russia takes those steps, that will end up further reinforcing the West's mind that Russia is intent on expanding the war when, in fact, all that Russia is doing is reacting to Western provocations.