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Europe faces a 'real threat' from Russia, warns US army commander

Monday, April 20, 2015 13:12

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The commander of the US army in Europe has warned that Nato must remain united in the face of a “real threat” from Russia.

“It’s not an assumption. There is a Russian threat,” Lt-Gen Frederick “Ben” Hodges said.

“You’ve got the Russian ambassador threatening that Denmark will be a nuclear target if it participates in any missile defence programme. And when you look at the unsafe way Russian aircraft are flying without transponders in proximity to civilian aircraft, that’s not professional conduct.”

Gen Hodges spoke to the Telegraph on the sidelines of a military debriefing after anexercise to move live Patriot missiles 750 miles across Europe by road and deploy them on the outskirts of Warsaw.

The sight of a US military convoy crossing the German-Polish border more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War made international headlines and brought traffic to a standstill as people posed for selfies beside the troops.

The intention of such a highly visible deployment was to send a signal, Gen Hodges said.

“That’s exactly what it was about, reassuring our allies,” he said.

Gen Hodges pointed to recent Russian decisions to move Iskandar ballistic missiles to its Kaliningrad enclave, between Lithuania and Poland, and long-range nuclear-capable bombers to Crimea.

“I don’t think a military confrontation is inevitable. But you have to be militarily ready in order to enable effective diplomacy,” he said.

“The best insurance we have against a showdown is that Nato stands together.”

Since taking over command of the US army in Europe last year, Gen Hodges has found himself on the front line of an increasingly nervous stand-off with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Eastern European countries are looking to Nato, and the US in particular, for reassurance that they will not be left to face Russian aggression alone.

A year after it pulled its last tank out of Europe, the US is sending hundreds of tanks and heavy fighting vehicles back to the continent, and Gen Hodges is in the middle of talks over where to position them.

But he has also assumed command at a time when many Western European countries are cutting their military budgets, and relying ever more on the US for their defence.

“I think the question for each country to ask is: are they security consumers or security providers?” Gen Hodges said. “Do they bring capabilities the alliance needs?”

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He declined to be drawn on the UK’s defence budget, and the major parties’ failure to commit to Nato’s spending target of 2 per cent of GDP.

^{A Russian Federation Air Force Su-27 Sukhoi fighter aircraft during a training exercise}

“I’m sure they’re not going to line up Russian tanks and go rolling into another country,” he said. “They don’t want a military confrontation with Nato. Our alliance is the most successful alliance in history and it has a lot of capability.”

Russia will not risk an open attack on a Nato member, he believes, for fear the alliance will invoke Article V of its treaty, under which an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Instead, the danger is that Russia will seek to put pressure on Nato members on its borders through other means.

“Russia doesn’t want to let the temperature reach 100C, they want to keep the temperature at 90C, 95C, but they try to keep it under 100C,” he said.

“There’s information, economic pressure, border violations. There are different ways of keeping the pressure up. They don’t want a clear attack, they want a situation where all 28 [Nato member countries] won’t say there’s a clear attack.”

He pointed to the large Russian-speaking populations in the Baltic countries, and the economic power Russia has as a major consumer of eastern European agricultural produce, as possible avenues Mr Putin may try to exploit.

But he said that Nato remains united in the face of Russian aggression.

Credit to The Telegraph

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