The military bloc's push for higher defense spending encourages more wars, the Brazilian president has said

NATO is fueling a global arms race by pushing for massive increases in military spending, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said. The US-led military bloc endorsed a plan last month to raise its defense spending target from 2% to 5% of GDP.

Speaking on Sunday at the opening of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, Lula said the world is experiencing a record number of armed conflicts since World War II and warned that NATO's policies are exacerbating the situation.

"NATO's recent decision [to raise military spending to 5% of GDP] is fueling an arms race," Lula said. "It has become much easier to invest in maintaining wars than to invest in achieving peace," the Brazilian leader said, referring to previous Western promises to provide 0.7% of GDP to aid developing countries.

While not yet formalized, the NATO proposal has been backed by Secretary-General Mark Rutte and several member states, including the US and Poland. A number of Western leaders have justified the spending increase as a response to what they claim is a growing threat from Russia.

Moscow has consistently denied any intention to attack NATO states and dismissed such warnings as baseless fearmongering aimed at justifying militarization and distracting from domestic problems.

In an interview published on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated that NATO's expansion toward Russia's borders and efforts to integrate Ukraine into the alliance constitute a direct threat to Russian security. He said these moves left Moscow with no choice but to launch its military operation against Kiev in 2022.

Lavrov also accused NATO of transforming itself into an offensive bloc, pointing to its past interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. He claimed that NATO's militarization and demonization of Russia are being used to deflect attention from inflation, migration, and other domestic problems in the West.

The minister has also warned that NATO's proposed spending increase could end up being "catastrophic" and lead to the bloc's collapse. Moscow, meanwhile, intends to reduce its military spending in the coming years - a process that will be guided by "common sense, not made-up threats like NATO member states," Lavrov said.