Daily Archives: November 20, 2014

Russian jets probing NATO airspace and supersized war drills are spilling Kremlin military secrets and scaring European nations into stiffening their armed forces.

The alliance said by late October it intercepted more than 100 Russian planes this year, more than three times the number in 2013. A report by the European Leadership Network, a London security research group, termed the incidents a highly disturbing picture of violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles and narrowly avoided mid-air collisions.

Yet there are benefits for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Clearly, every time we come into contact with Russian forces and every time we see their tactics and how they deploy, we do learn about them, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the 28-member NATOs top military commander, said in Tallinn on Nov. 19. They are just happening more often and occasionally, the size of the activities is larger.

A worsening standoff is pitting Europe and the U.S. against Russia over Ukraine in the biggest crisis since the Cold Wars end 25 years ago. Even German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- a persistent proponent of dialog -- said on Nov. 18 after shuttle diplomacy in Kiev and Moscow, that he sees little reason for optimism.

The rapid mobilization of 20,000 to 40,000 Russian troops at the Ukrainian border scared the hell out of NATO, Karl-Heinz Kamp, academic director at the German governments Federal Academy for Security Policy in Berlin, said by phone.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the U.S. wants not to humiliate, but to subjugate Russia, in remarks at a Nov. 18 meeting of his Peoples Front party supporters in Moscow.

We had such brilliant politicians like Nikita Khrushchev, who hammered the desk with his shoe at the United Nations, Putin said in an Oct. 24 speech. And the whole world, primarily the United States, and NATO thought: this Nikita is best left alone, he might just go and fire a missile.

Monitoring drills and Russian aircraft flying along NATO or Finnish and Swedish airspace is yielding intelligence on command and control, communications and tactics, said Lukasz Kulesa, research director of the ELN in London and former deputy head of Polands National Security Bureau that advises the Polish president. Non-NATO members Finland and Sweden upgraded their alliance ties in September.

A Russian mission that sent planes on the same day to the Baltic, the North Sea and the Black Sea tells us what Russian capabilities have become, Kulesa said by phone. It gives us a much better understanding of Russian readiness and their ability to perform more complex deployments.

Read more here:
Russia's War Games Spill Secrets, Stiffen NATO Resolve

Russias demand that Ukraine guarantee it wont join NATO violates the countrys independence, the head of the alliance said, as the two sides traded accusations over who is fueling the conflict in the ex-Soviet republic.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to arrive in Kiev for talks today with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko after North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged Vladimir Putins government to pull back its troops from inside eastern Ukraine and from the border area. Meanwhile, Russias State Security Council said the U.S. was instigating the fighting.

We call on Russia to stop fueling the conflict, Stoltenberg said in Tallinn, Estonia. He also urged Russia to use all its influence to make sure pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine are respecting a Sept. 5 cease-fire that has been broken almost daily.

The Ukrainian crisis has intensified since the pro-Russian rebels in two breakaway regions held Nov. 2 elections that the government in Kiev condemned as illegitimate. Ukraine, the European Union and the U.S. accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of supporting the separatists. Russia denies involvement.

The United Nations cited a total breakdown of law and order in eastern Ukraine and linked Russian fighters to human-rights violations in a report yesterday. It raised its estimation of the death toll there to least 4,317 people, with 9,921 wounded and 466,829 displaced.

The continuing presence of a large amount of sophisticated weaponry, as well as foreign fighters that include servicemen from the Russian Federation, directly affects the human rights situation in the east of Ukraine, according to the UN report posted on the website of human rights chief Zeid Raad Al Hussein. Civilians have continued to be killed, unlawfully detained, tortured and disappeared.

The conflict has unnerved countries in Europes former communist east, with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite saying that Putin is pushing Russia to be aggressive, to occupy other regions and to drastically reorganize international security in the world, and especially in Europe.

Were facing a situation in which some of our neighbors are becoming a terrorist country, she said yesterday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday faulted a reckless, nonstop expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union as undermining European security and contributing to the conflict in Ukraine.

The U.S. was one of the initiators of the conflict in Ukraine, and if they supply weapons there, the conflict will grow, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told reporters in Moscow yesterday.

Read the original post:
NATO Rejects Russia Demand for Unaligned Ukraine as Biden Visits

By David Mardiste and Jonathan Saul

AMARI Estonia/LONDON (Reuters) - NATO warplanes have had to scramble 400 times this year in response to an increase in Russian air activity around Europe not seen since the Cold War, the alliance's chief said on Thursday.

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members have sought to fill gaps in the alliance's land, air and sea defences since Russia annexed Crimea and backed a secessionist movement in the eastern part of Ukraine.

Speaking to U.S., German and Estonian troops at a newly expanded and renovated air base in western Estonia, which once housed a Soviet military installation, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the problem was not just where the Russians are flying but that they are not turning on their transponders or communicating.

He said the flights - which have risen 50 percent over the last year - posed a risk to commercial air traffic.

"This pattern is risky and unjustified, so NATO remains vigilant. We are here and we are ready to defend all our allies against any threats, Stoltenberg said in a speech after meeting Estonian Prime Minister Taavi Roivas.

"It is a pattern which we have not seen for many years and it is a pattern that reminds us of the way they conducted these kind of military air activities back in the time of the Cold War."

Vice Admiral Peter Hudson, commander of NATO's Allied Maritime Command, said Russia was using its military forces in a "much more assertive manner", which included more Russian naval activity in the Baltic region.

"From a NATO perspective, we are going about our legitimate business in international waters working with our allies. They are occasionally interfering, occasionally operating as a nuisance," Hudson told Reuters in London.

"Safety has not been breached, but it is just a style of behaviour which we have not seen for 25 years, since the end of the Cold War," he said.

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NATO has scrambled jets 400 times - Stoltenberg