NATO - FROM KALININGRAD TO KAMCHATKA?

Abstract

(By commentator Pavel Felgengauer. Novaya gazeta, June 24, 2016, p. 10. Complete text:) A summit of 28 NATO heads of state and government will take place in early July, in Warsaw, but it is primarily a political PR event with a show of unity. The main military and organizational decisions already been prepared and harmonized - particularly at a meeting of NATO defense ministers last week in Brussels. ... [Russian Defense Minister] Sergei Shoigu last attended a meeting with NATO defense ministers in Brussels in fall 2013. At the time, Shoigu agreed with his [then-] counterpart in the US, Chuck Hagel, to hold regular personal video conferences to deal with possible misunderstandings and expedite cooperation. Several such conferences were held until March 2014. ... Last week, the Pentagon’s current chief, Ashton Carter, announced in Brussels that the alliance’s main objective is to deter Russian aggression, boasting that a lot has been accomplished since March 2014, but that these are only the first steps. Carter lamented the fact that over the 25 peaceful years since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (considered to be the day the cold war formally ended), the allies relaxed, lost many of their skills, and their deterrence capabilities have atrophied. Now everything has to be built anew, not only to deter a potential aggressor but also to defeat it, necessary. ... After the [annexation of the] Crimea [see Current Digest, Vol. 66, No. 12, pp. 3 - 11], when fighting erupted in the Donetsk Basin, the Western allies were shocked, almost in a panic. It was clear that Ukraine was absolutely unprepared to defend itself and that if it wanted to, the Russian Army cut through its Russian-speaking regions, from Odessa to Transnistria, like a hot knife through butter. ... US Gen. Philip Breedlove, then [NATO’s] supreme allied commander Europe (SACEUR), believed that in case of invasion, the Russian force could accomplish its objective between three to five days. In 2014, neither the US nor [its] allies had a ready military-organizational response, and so they had to improvise. Six NATO countries on the eastern flank (Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) each got a US motorized infantry company with tanks on a rotational basis from the negligible forces that remained in Europe after the end of the cold war. In all, six companies, or two battalions, were deployed along a front extending from Finland to Turkey. This was an extremely thin line of forward-based pickets with US soldiers who were supposed to scare off the unpredictable Russians by [threatening] the possibility of a global conflict in the event of a minor clash. ... Two years passed. The panic subsided and the worst fears remained in the realm of fantasies. The mobilization plan adopted in the summer of 2014 at a NATO summit has been implemented, according to the alliance. Now, in the event of a crisis, a 40,000-strong multinational European rapid response force be redeployed in three to four weeks to support the forward-based US companies in the east, while its forward-based brigade be redeployed in less than a week. Now, a decision on a more carefully thought out and differentiated structure of confrontation with the Russian Federation has been prepared for the next NATO summit. Novorossia,1 extending as far as Odessa, failed to materialize. The West clearly overestimated Moscow’s aggressive mood, just as it previously overestimated its willingness to seek peaceful compromises. ... Nor is there evidence of either a direct or indirect threat to Romania and Bulgaria, much to the chagrin of the Romanians. According to informed sources at NATO headquarters, Bucharest had proposed an initiative to deploy an army brigade and expand it into a full-fledged multinational combined unit - the basis of a future Multinational Division Southeast. For now, a compromise has been reached: A Romanian-Bulgarian training brigade will be created, and a full-fledged Division Command Southeast may appear sometime in 2018. Meanwhile, the Multinational Corps Northeast headquarters has been fully equipped and activated in Poland. To somehow reassure the Romanians, its allies decided to grant their other request: to establish NATO’s permanent naval presence in the Black Sea, which is still structurally uncoordinated. This, of course, immediately upset Russia’s official Foreign Ministry. ... The focus is currently on the Baltic region. The decision was made to deploy four reinforced multinational armored battalions to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. This is not a very large force, of course, but it is no longer just a picket. Only one of these battalions will be predominantly American; the others will be purely European (plus Canadian). The maximum possible number of contingents from various countries is needed to accomplish an important political task - i.