In a brazen move to prepare for war with Russia, the United States is planning to permanently station battle tanks and other heavy weaponry and maintain a force of up to 5,000 US troops in the Baltic States and other Eastern European NATO countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or its periphery.
The move, first reported over the weekend by the New York Times, was confirmed Sunday by the Polish Defense Ministry, which said that it is negotiating a plan with Washington to deploy American heavy weaponry on Polish soil. Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak indicated that he had discussed the plan last month with military officials in Washington and had been assured that a decision would be made soon.
The pre-positioning of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored howitzers and other instruments of war is an immense escalation of the US-led drive to compel Russia to accept American domination of Eurasia and its own reduction to semicolonial status. It brings the entire region, already bristling with arms, to the brink of war, threatening the entire world with a nuclear holocaust.
Whatever the timetable for war being discussed by the Pentagon and CIA madmen who formulate US policy, the stationing of US weapons and troops in the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), as well as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and possibly Hungary, dramatically heightens the potential for a relatively minor incident to escalate rapidly into a full-scale war.
Led by the US, NATO is already carrying out military exercises all along Russia’s western border, from the Arctic Ocean to the Baltic and Black seas. NATO is developing a rapid deployment force designed to intervene against Russia in a matter of days. Scores of incidents between NATO and Russian planes and ships have already occurred.