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Michael Fallon: United Kingdom to send troops to Baltic states

Mr Fallon said ministers will be calling on Russian Federation to “stop propping up the Assad regime” as well as planning support to neighbouring countries, particularly Turkey and Jordan.

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Defence secretary Michael Fallon said troops in the Baltic region would deter Russian aggression beyond Ukraine and reassure eastern European North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members.

“This is further reassurance for our allies on the eastern flank of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – for the Baltic states and for Poland”, he said.

“That is part of our more persistent presence on the eastern side of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to respond to any further provocation and aggression”.

Right now, about 75 British military trainers are stationed in western Ukraine, where they work with a total of 1,600 Ukrainian troops, according to the Financial Times.

The troops would be based in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland where they would undertake training and evaluation of the threat from Russian Federation.

Mr Stoltenberg condemned the latest escalation in Syria, which saw Russian warships in the Caspian Sea launch cruise missile strikes against opposition forces fighting President Bashar Assad.

It June it carried out a mock landing at Ustka, Poland, to send a clear message to Putin.

‘What it does do is complicate an already hard situation and make it very much more unsafe because these planes are not being co-ordinated with the rest of the campaign and more importantly than that, the strikes don’t seem to be for the most part strikes against Isil.

Defence sources told BBC assistant political editor Norman Smith they believed only a “tiny minority” of Russian airstrikes in Syria were targeting IS forces, with a few intelligence reports suggesting only one in 20 were directed against the militant Islamist group.

“In Brussels, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ministers will be discussing how we can encourage the Russians to use their influence to stop propping up the Assad regime – which is bombing its own citizens and has helped to fuel the rise of Isil”.

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NATO-Russia relations deteriorated sharply following Crimea’s reunification with Russian Federation and the beginning of an internal conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Michael Fallon