NATO And Russia Playing Dangerous Game with Military Build-Up
- Emphasis and remarks mine:
- NATO And Russia Playing Dangerous Game with Military Build-Up
by Luke Harding, https://www.theguardian.com/international
Russia wants to detract from problems at home and position itself as a superpower, and Nato troop movements can only help. (This is propaganda and the inverting reality. It is the West that is driving Russia to WW3. They need it as a distraction for their collapsing economy and financial system. America needs it to push Hillary into the White House.)
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It has been billed as Nato’s biggest military build-up on Russia’s borders since the cold war. Britain is sending fighter jets next year to Romania. The US is dispatching troops, tanks and artillery to Poland. Germany, Canada and other Nato countries also pledged forces at a meeting on Wednesday of defence chiefs in Brussels.
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The move comes after Russia has been busy deploying hardware of its own. Earlier this month, Moscow said it was stationing nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave. This week, two Russian warships armed with cruise missiles slipped into the Baltic sea.
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Meanwhile, the hulking Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov has been belching its way through the Channel en route to Syria. Spain said Moscow had withdrawn a request to refuel on Spain’s north African coast, amid western suspicions the Russian fleet will be used to flatten civilians in Aleppo.
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Nato’s apparent goal here is to deter future acts of aggression on European territory by Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia. After a period in which Nato has seemed slow to react, and lacking in backbone, the alliance is now sending out a robust message. As the US defence secretary, Ash Carter, put it this week, these deployments are all about deterrence.
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In particular, Nato wants to signal to Moscow that it is prepared to defend the embattled Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In May, Britain will send an 800-strong battalion to Estonia, supported by the French and Danes. By next summer, about 4,000 troops from Nato countries will face off against 330,000 Russian soldiers stationed on Moscow’s western border.
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None of this means Europe is on the brink of an imminent east-west conflict. Or – as Donald Trump and some commentators have suggested apocalyptically – that the world is gearing up for a third world war. It isn’t. Speaking at a conference in Sochi on Thursday, Putin agreed. He told a group of western experts that it was “stupid and unrealistic” to think Russia might attack anyone in Europe.
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Despite the cold war atmospherics, then, there’s little prospect of Russian tanks rolling across the border into the Baltic states anytime soon.
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