To reassure nervous east European allies once ruled from Moscow, NATO also tripled the size of its fast Response Force to some 40,000 troops and created a 5,000-strong “Spearhead” unit to deploy within days to any new crisis point.
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Planned NATO talks with Moscow should be focussed exclusively on Russia’s “withdrawal” from Ukrainian soil, Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz has said.
NATO’s modernization is crystallizing around a new force in the Baltics and Poland of up to 4,000 troops to serve as a constant reminder to Moscow that the alliance is back to its founding mandate of defending its territory, after years of missions beyond its borders.
In May Stoltenberg had said Nato member states were aiming to try for a meeting of the Nato-Russia Council before the summit.
Air defenses in the Baltics, a strategy against potential Russian cyber attacks and a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation presence in the Black Sea, where Russia has a fleet, will also be strengthened over time, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation diplomats say. A second base in Poland is under construction.
The Kremlin’s concern, said Pavel Felgenhauer, a veteran Moscow military analyst, is that the launchers could be loaded with cruise missiles able to reach Putin’s residence in Sochi in a few minutes.
“The belief of the general staff is that this is just cover, that the bases are there for a first strike, meant to kill Putin”, said Felgenhauer.
A die-hard dissident repeatedly arrested under communism, Macierewicz said “we can forget about fear” even though, he said, Russian Federation is taking steps that are a threat to regional and wider peace, like the actions in Ukraine or moving troops and weapons on its own territory.
The Defence Select Committee said United Kingdom expertise over Russian Federation had “withered on the vine” since the end of the Cold War and Britain risked “blundering into conflicts” if it failed to act. There has been a growing number of near-misses between planes and ships, particularly in the Baltic.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement that a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council will take place on July 13 at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, shortly after the NATO summit in Warsaw on July 8-9.
“There was no reason to be very concerned five years ago when you could count on more or less peaceful behavior of the Russian side”, said Igor Sutyagin, a research fellow in Russian studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
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“Most of the people involved can’t remember the Cold War”, said Harvard University professor Graham Allison, who advised the Pentagon in the 1980s.
