Sao Paulo
NATO begins next Saturday (9) the first military exercise in the Baltic Sea, simulating an attack by Russia in the region, a theater of growing tensions between the Western military alliance, Moscow and its ally Belarus.
30 ships and around 3,000 soldiers are involved, all from countries bordering NATO: Germany, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, in addition to the candidate for admission to the Sweden Club.
Other countries in the alliance will also participate, such as the United States, which will send the amphibious assault ship Mesa Verde, a 200meterlong ship that can carry 800 marines ashore at the same time.
While military maneuvers are always designed for realworld scenarios, it is rare for their developers to publicly name the target. Tensions in Europe since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 last year have changed that.
“We are sending a clear message of vigilance to Russia: Not with us here,” Admiral Jan Christian Kaack told reporters in Berlin this Friday (1). He went further, describing a Russian attack scenario that has been on the radar for years, in which the three Baltic states are isolated by land by occupying the strip of land on the PolishLithuanian border that separates Belarus from the Russian exclave Kaliningrad.
“If the Suwalki Corridor [nome da ligação] is closed, and this is easy to do as there are only two highways and a railway line, so we will only have sea routes [para apoiar lituanos, letões e estonianos]. So we have to keep going,” said Kaack.
The war changed the geopolitical configuration in the Baltics for 200 years. Sweden abandoned the neutrality that marked its defeat by the Russian Empire and applied to join NATO, while Finland, for the same reason, left behind seven decades of nonalignment and joined the club this year.
The move comes at a particularly acute time in the region. As if the natural tensions of war were not enough, Poland has come into conflict with Belarus, a dictatorship that is Putin’s only ally in the region and is considered Moscow’s military vassal.
Minsk does not directly participate in the conflict in Ukraine, but allows its territory to be used for Russian movements and attacks. More importantly, after years of balancing its status as a subsidiary country of the socalled Union State with Russia and a partner of the European Union, Belarus is now fully integrated into its neighbor’s military structure.
This happened from 2020, when large protests against electoral fraud weakened the position of the dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who had been in power since 1994. Now Putin has even installed his tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, sparking widespread concern in the region.
Fears only grew as Wagner Group mercenaries were moved to camps under Lukashenko’s control as part of the deal that ended their mutiny against Russian military leadership on June 24. The death of their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash on the 23rd under suspicious conditions only increased suspicion about the future of the soldiers’ actions.
Poland and Lithuania strengthened their borders, with the second country closing two of the six border crossings into Belarus. Warsaw accused Minsk of invading its airspace with helicopters two weeks ago, and this Friday it was the Belarusians’ turn to point out the same actions by the Poles.
To make matters worse, Putin himself has toughened his tone towards the Poles, suggesting that they want to intervene militarily in the war that the Russians started with their takeover of western Ukraine. Poland, one of NATO’s most belligerent members and planning to spend a record 4% of GDP on defense this year, has denied that intention.
In this climate, the NATO exercise will certainly provide more opportunities for accidental clashes between Russian, Belarusian and Western forces in the region. There have been several sidetoside airstrikes in recent weeks, an increasingly common practice that could lead to undue escalation.
For example, Russian warplanes hit American drones in the Black Sea and Syria this year. The activity in both regions prompted the US to deploy more aircraft to monitor the situation. On Tuesday (29), Washington landed a nuclearcapable strategic bomber in Norway for the first time, something that did not happen even during the Cold War.
A B2 Spirit model, a radar stealth aircraft nicknamed the stealth bomber, was refueled at Orland air base, about 1,000 km from the Russian Northern Fleet base in Murmansk, Arctic. The aircraft is part of a contingent of three B2s that have been operating from Keflavik, Iceland since February 13.
According to the US Air Force, the goal is to maintain an active troop presence in the contested Arctic region, where the Russians have a large presence. Since NATO member Norway prohibits the presence of nuclear weapons on its territory, it is assumed that the B2 was either unarmed or equipped with conventional missiles and bombs. However, the message is clear.