Putin keeps us awake at night - Putin's plans for the Baltics

[octoberlib]

Radek Sikorski was Poland’s defense minister from 2005 to 2007 and foreign minister from 2007 to 2014.

CHOBIELIN, Poland — What keeps you awake at night if you are the foreign minister of one of America’s vulnerable allies, as I was? That Russian President Vladimir Putin will do to you what he has already done to Georgia and Ukraine: start a hybrid war.

A war denied by the head of state and spurred by cyberattacks and subversion, in which planes and tanks without markings, operated by soldiers without insignia, march into our territory. A war that stays below the threshold of a full-scale invasion.We would call for help but the situation might be too ambiguous to justify international intervention. We would need our allies, especially the United States, not to send us fact-finding missions or diplomatic demarches but planes, tanks and soldiers.


That scenario is not the worst we can imagine. In fact, for the past few years Russia has been practicing something even more sinister. The Russian military’s Zapad (“West”) exercises envisage a hybrid war against the Baltic states, followed by the detonation of a nuclear weapon.

It’s part of a doctrine that analysts call “escalating to de-escalate” but it’s anything but peaceful. It is designed to stun leaders so much that we give up right away. Given that planning for a nuclear war has become unthinkable in our post-modern world, Russia calculates that our leaders would hesitate if confronted with the real thing and would refuse to strike back.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/07/17/putin/?utm_term=.3a552bd9aedc