False Alert: Is Russia Beefing Up Forces on NATO’s Border?
This article originally appeared on the War on the Rocks blog.
With NATO’s Warsaw Summit beginning today, NATO leaders are expected to decide for the rotational deployment of four multi-national battalions (~4,000 men) in the three Baltic states and Poland. In addition, in 2017, the Pentagon will send a full brigade (~5,000 men), permanently roaming between NATO’s eastern allies (including Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria as well as the Baltic states).
NATO’s new deployment seems modest in comparison to Russia’s conventional military superiority in Russia’s Western Military District (~300,000 men), which stretches across a large geographical area from the western city of Pskov all the way to the Urals. And if Russia is “building up” forces close to the Baltic borders then this deployment becomes increasingly justified, right?
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Ulrich Kühn
Ulrich Kühn is a research associate at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
Photo credit: Flickr photo by Matt Foster shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC 2.0) license.