As fighting rages in Ukraine, NATO allies along the Alliance's eastern rim are collectively conducting the most significant — and fastest — military deployment in modern European history: the level of alert and preparedness is not war-like, but it is far from calm.
Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has thrust Europe and NATO back into a scenario they thought was part of the past.
Struggling for relevance after a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and plagued by divisions between European allies with very different views on their future role, the alliance has planned a reset in 2022 to keep up with the US pivot to Asia and threats from China.
Within weeks, instead, an unprecedented degree of unity was created in response to the original adversary: Moscow.
Today, Eastern Europe is more militarized than at any time since the height of the Cold War. The nuclear superpowers face off again across the vast expanse between the Baltic and Black seas.
At the same time, arms control agreements from the Cold War era have been torn up, and the same applies to communication channels between Moscow and Western capitals.
The result is a continent with more weapons and soldiers on high alert than at any time in recent decades, but without the protective fences that provided security during the Cold War: Europe is arguably less secure today than at any time since 1945.
This raises the question of whether NATO's military build-up has made Europe better protected, or merely intensified an already tense situation.
The Russian president sees it as the latest in a series of threatening steps to justify an attack on Kiev.
He has stepped up rhetoric in recent days about a possible attack on NATO members - a move that would almost certainly trigger Article 5 on mutual defense between members of the Alliance, and possibly spark a world war. He accused the Alliance of intimidation and proxy warfare against him in Ukraine over billions of dollars in arms stockpiles.
"We have all the weapons we need to do this," he said last Sunday, referring to a potential response and alluding to Russia's state-of-the-art nuclear missile system.
"No one else can boast of such a weapon, and we won't either. But we will use it".
NATO claims it has little choice in terms of increasing its presence in eastern Europe.
"Is it safer? Well, we won't be safer if we don't do that either," said Admiral Rob Bauer, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, the highest military body of the Alliance.
"Not being strong and credible is more dangerous than being strong and credible," he added. "The deterrence factor is very important."
NATO response to the invasion
Less than two weeks after Putin's invasion, NATO overturned decades of conventional thinking within the alliance about military positioning in Europe and the risk of angering Moscow — even as Putin vowed to retaliate against any threat to Russian security and repeatedly threatened to deploy nuclear weapons.
Forty thousand soldiers in Eastern Europe are under the direct command of NATO, which is ten times more than the day before Putin's invasion. NATO battle groups are now located in eight countries - twice as many as before. The Rapid Action Force, which has up to 10 soldiers, was activated in the name of collective defense for the first time in the history of the Alliance.
"The trigger was the Russian attack on Ukraine. Death and destruction, and the way the operations were conducted," said Bauer.
"European security and defense have evolved more in the last six days than in the last two decades", said on March 1 the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, faced with the new reality of the continent.
At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US had 200 troops in West Germany.
Today, the NATO countries on the eastern flank, from the Baltic in the north to Bulgaria on the Black Sea, can boast of 330 soldiers: the national armies have received reinforcements from Western Europe, the USA and Canada. In addition to ground forces, as many as 000 NATO aircraft are on high alert, and around 130 warships are patrolling the seas.
"It was unimaginable before," said a senior Alliance official describing the change in NATO's presence in Eastern Europe.
NATO officers justify the military build-up as a necessary security measure to bolster their ability to defend the alliance against the scale of Russian warfare seen against Ukraine — and as boosting deterrence capacity in line with perceptions of how much risk Putin is willing to take.
"Before the invasion, we were in a dilemma, and people said: no, we should continue the dialogue, we should be careful with the military positioning, we should not push Putin to act because of something we are doing," Bauer said. "However, whatever we do, he will do what he wants: that's the problem."
NATO's response to the invasion of Ukraine has actually been ready for four years as a series of pre-prepared emergency steps designed by the Alliance's defense chiefs for exactly this scenario.
After the end of the Cold War, a listless NATO searched for purpose as direct threats to members appeared to be receding. The Alliance went beyond its geographical boundaries to intervene in the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
NATO has become an Alliance "about wars of choice", said Bauer. "And we did that for 20 years."
The first Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the aim of annexing Crimea in 2014, woke up the Alliance from that slumber.
"Crimea taught us that we are not the ones who determine the time for the conflict, but the opponent, the enemy," Bauer said.
"That led to a polemic: does everything we have in terms of strategy and plans really correspond to that change? The answer to that question was basically negative".
Several internal agreements, serious names and jargon abbreviations, were drawn up, discussed and approved between 2018 and 2021, including the first new NATO military strategy in five decades and a complete rethinking of what is needed to deter an invasion by modernized Russian armed forces.
As a result, the leaders of NATO's 30 members at an emergency online summit on February 25 had only to agree on which of the five response plans were necessary. They agreed on all five.
"When the blueprints were made for all of this, it seemed quite boring and abstract. And then we pulled them out at the end of last year, and that was it: a massive increase in the presence of forces on the eastern perimeter," said a senior NATO official.
Alliance officials say that part of the military strengthening was realized only by fully equipping missions that previously had a shortage of personnel. Air patrols requiring eight aircraft were previously carried out by only three.
Most NATO officials agree that the most revolutionary change to the Alliance concerns the concept. States are no longer constrained by the founding act of NATO-Russia, a document signed in 1997 by the military alliance and Moscow, which, among other things, called for a reduction in military forces and the avoidance of new deployments near the territories of the signatories.
"The NATO-Russia agreement is still in force. But its content will not hinder anything we have to do," says Bauer. Privately, many member state officials say they consider him dead.
Risk of escalation
"NATO has deployed forces on our borders," Putin said in a speech at the 2007 Munich conference, which is now believed to have marked a turning point in his relations with the West and buried the Moscow-NATO partnership. "We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion directed?".
During his more than 22 years at the helm of Russia, Putin has repeatedly criticized what he sees as NATO's inexorable eastward expansion.
Since the reunification of Germany and the fall of the USSR, 12 countries have joined the Alliance. The three Baltic states were former Soviet republics. Seven were members of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact. Eastern bloc NATO is 1.100 km closer to the Kremlin than the border of West Germany in 1989.
When he announced the invasion of Ukraine in February, Putin kept returning to the topic of NATO expansion as a justification.
"The fundamental threats that irresponsible politicians from the West are crudely creating year after year, step by step, in relation to our country: I mean the expansion of the NATO bloc to the east, the approach of its military infrastructure to the Russian borders," said Putin.
Bauer rejects such rhetoric as "meaningless".
"We are responding to Putin's actions. We don't do it because we want to show an escalating attitude. He is attacking Ukraine. He is in Belarus. He invaded Georgia. We have not attacked Russia, not once. We respond to those actions," he says.
Russia's Western Military District, which includes territories bordering Finland, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine, plus the exclave of Kaliningrad, has the largest and best-equipped forces in the country. More than 300.000 soldiers provide the full spectrum of warfare, from tank divisions, special forces and land-based missile launchers, in addition to naval and air bases.
As a result of the Kremlin's moves in recent years to deepen its control over its ally Belarus - where the Russian armed forces have deployed tens of thousands of troops this winter - NATO and Russia's increased military presence are now closer together, regardless of the ultimate outcome of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
NATO firmly refuses to support any direct intervention in Ukraine, while underlining its promise to defend "every inch" of the Alliance's territory against possible spillover. However, it is hard to ignore the reality that the means to avoid escalation - more troops and more equipment - also increase the risk of it happening.
"Of course, as long as the war continues, there will be a risk of escalation outside of Ukraine," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said last month. "And this is exactly what NATO is focused on, to prevent that escalation ... by increasing the presence in the eastern part of the Alliance".
"The danger from hot spots, from escalation is obviously greater," said a senior military defense official from a major NATO member. "It will take years or decades for what happened in a few months to disappear. Things are starting to become the norm very quickly”.
The official added: "And this is happening during a period of time where Putin is getting older and thinking more about his legacy and probably becoming less predictable and less stable in his thoughts and actions."
Unfinished business
It is increasingly likely that the border between NATO and Russia will be increasingly crowded and tense. Finland and Sweden, which previously opted for a loose partnership with NATO over membership, are debating changing that long-standing policy as public support shifts toward collective defense in light of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Finland's membership would add more than 1.300 km to the NATO-Russia border, more than doubling its current length. If Belarus is added, the two military powers would touch each other along about 3.750 km.
Moscow has warned that a move by Finland or Sweden to join NATO would require a military response and end the "non-nuclear status of the Baltic Sea".
NATO says its buildup in the east is far from over. At the Alliance summit in Madrid in June, he is expected to approve plans to continue strengthening that flank.
Bauer says possible future steps include more rigid command and control systems, integrated air and missile defense systems and larger troop deployments than existing battle groups. This would be supported by substantial stockpiles of ammunition, medical and anti-missile defense “to create the capacity to sustain things for a longer period of time”.
"Regardless of whether this war (in Ukraine) ends in a few weeks, months or years, it will have long-term consequences for our security, in the way that NATO should respond and provide continuous collective defense and security," he said. is Stoltenberg.
Bauer says NATO remains committed to de-escalation efforts, but that Russia has cut off all channels. He tried to establish communication with the opposite party - Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov - before the invasion and after it began - but was rebuffed.
And while the fighting ability - and reputational prestige - of the Russian armed forces have been damaged after more than two months of war in Ukraine, where the planned quick capture of Kiev collapsed in a flurry of logistical and strategic failures and operational shortcomings, Bauer says NATO must not relax.
"The Russians believed their own nonsense (about Ukraine) ... I hope that will not happen, but it should be assumed that they would have adequately prepared (for an attack on NATO)," says Bauer.
"If you thought they were three meters tall before, you have to be careful not to say that they are now half a meter tall. I think it would be unwise to underestimate them," Bauer concluded.
Prepared by: A Šofranac, N. Bogetić
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