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June 23, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 4
signal of deterrence to “a more assertive Russia”.
The deployments too of new battle groups to the Baltic region also underscore that “an attack on one Nato ally will trigger a response from the whole alliance”, Stoltenberg added. The military alliance has also tripled the size of its response force to 40,000 troops, including a group that could deploy within days.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the exercises by the military alliance illustrated the West’s reluctance to give up its “anti-Russian course”, while his country and China plan to hold large naval exercises in the region immediately after Nato’s drills end. Another joint show of force is also scheduled days after Trump visits Nato ally Poland in July on his way to the G20 summit.
And in the autumn, Russia will conduct with Belarus its Zapad (“West”) military exercises with 100,000 troops along Nato’s western border to simulate a full-scale conflict with the alliance, the first of these regular four-yearly wargames since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
But beyond these carefully calculated shows of military strength, it is the alarming brinkmanship in the skies in the past days that raises the most worries.
The June 18 shooting down of a Syrian govern- ment warplane by a US aircraft already brought the uneasy interaction between Russia and the US-led coalition in the Syrian conflict into the spotlight once again. Russia responded by sever- ing communications channels designed to avert mid-air incidents, and said US jets flying in Syria west of the Euphrates River would be treated as targets.
On June 19, the US said a Russian jet had flown within 1.5m of a US spy plane in the Baltic, while Moscow responded by saying that the reconnais- sance plane had made a “provocative” move. Upping the ante further, on June 21 a Nato F-16 fighter jet flew close to Defence Minister Shoigu’s
plane as he flew to the Russian Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, prompting a Russian fighter plane to intercept and show a Nato pilot that it was armed by dipping its wings. The Nato jet then flew off, according to footage that was aired later.
Russian fighter jets were scrambled 14 times during the past week to intercept foreign recon- naissance aircraft near Russian borders, the Russian Defence Ministry said on June 23. The previous week, the ministry reported 18 such incidents.
Russia and Nato quickly blamed each other for aggressive intercepts in the strategically impor- tant Baltic region, which saw similar incidents earlier this and last year. In April 2016, a Russian jet came within 9m of the US destroyer Donald Cook conducting exercises in the Baltic Sea in what the US navy described as a “simulated at- tack”. This was one of the closest and riskiest encounters between the countries’ armed forces in recent years.
“Such fly-bys were not uncommon during the Cold War, but their numbers went down after the end of it,” said Harvard’s Saradzhyan. “However, a combination of the crisis in Western-Russian relations over Ukraine since 2014 and the longer- term trend of increases in Russia’s defence expenditures made them routine again. The more of such fly-bys occur, the greater the chances they’d end up in a collision with losses of lives that would lead to a military confrontation.”
With Western-Russian relations already at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War, any confrontation, even once contained, erodes chances that the sides can resume cooperation in areas of mutual benefit such as counter- terrorism.
“Moreover, such a collision can trigger off an es- calation that could lead to an armed conflict even though the leaders on both sides do not desire such a war – recall all the close calls during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” added Saradzhyan.