Military tensions surged yesterday in Europe as NATO launched Operation Anaconda, the largest NATO military exercise in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, when the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991.
Some 31,000 troops, 3,000 vehicles, 105 aircraft, and 12 warships are participating in war games based on a scenario that war erupts between NATO and Russia, a nuclear-armed power. European defense officials in Warsaw said the scenario was one where there is “a mishap, a miscalculation which the Russians construe, or choose to construe, as an offensive action.”
The largest contingents in the exercises are 14,000 troops from the United States, 12,000 from Poland, and about 800 from Britain, as well as other forces, including from non-NATO countries. They will be commanded by Polish Lieutenant General Marek Tomaszycki.
Operation Anaconda is a massive provocation, effectively amounting to a dress rehearsal for a NATO invasion of Russia. In the exercise, for the first time since the Nazi invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union during World War II, German tanks will cross all of Poland from west to east.