The US
Secretary of Defense’s deputy assistant said that Russia could
potentially overpower NATO forces in the Baltics in 60 hours, adding
that with its greater budget the chances of deterring such “Russian
aggression” is set to significantly increase in 2017.
Capitals of
the Baltic states are presently vulnerable should Russians decide to
conquer them, but after 2017 the threat would decline thanks to
recently-approved US defense expenditures, believes Michael
Carpenter, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine,
and Eurasia.
“I
don’t know that we’re significantly more advanced now than when
the RAND Corporation report came out,” Carpenter
told Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. “But I’m
confident by the end of 2017, when we have an additional armored
brigade combat team worth of force posture on the eastern flank of
the alliance, that we will be,” he assured.
The report
of the RAND Corporation, partly funded by the US Department of
Defense, published in early February, maintained that NATO “cannot
successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members,”
urging the deployment of nothing less than seven brigades to the
Baltics to protect Tallinn and Riga from potentially being overrun in
less than “60 hours.”
The report
came as the Pentagon announced plans to quadruple its spending in
Europe in 2017.
“Russia
clearly possesses a time-distance advantage, if it were to decide to
be an aggressor in the Baltic states,” Carpenter said. “We
are making the investments … to have forces prepositioned, along
with more fighting equipment, so that we are better able to deter
Russian aggression in the first place.”
Ahead of the
NATO summit set to take place in Warsaw in July, Poland is hosting
unprecedented war games on its territory, which began on Monday. Over
31,000 troops from 24 countries are taking part in NATO’s Anaconda
2016 war drills in Poland – the largest war games in Eastern Europe
since the Cold War.
Lithuania is
hosting another NATO military exercise, the Iron Wolf 2016 war games,
which are the largest this year. The exercise started on Monday and
involves some heavy military hardware deployed for the occasion by
visiting members of the alliance.
The West
claims that the string of recent military drills is to assure eastern
Europe of NATO’s full commitment to defending them against Russia.
Meanwhile Moscow maintains it has no plans at all to interfere with
any country in the region, and expressed concerns over the
destabilizing and threatening NATO military build-up along the
Russian borders.
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