By Alexey Eremenko, The Moscow Times, Aug. 31 2014
The five NATO new bases intended to contain the Russian threat will be located in Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, a German newspaper reported Sunday. The bases will be used for logistics, reconnaissance and mission planning, and will boast permanent multinational staffs of between 300 and 600 employees per base, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
The workforce figures exclude actual troops, whose deployment in Eastern Europe is limited by a 1997 treaty between Russia and NATO known as the Founding Act, the report said. But “small contingents” of NATO troops will be present at the bases at all times, the daily said, citing a classified draft plan of the alliance’s revamp.
In addition, NATO will have a 4,000-strong rapid reaction force ready to deploy in the east within two to seven days, the report said. The figure was placed at 10,000 by The Financial Times on Saturday. The discrepancy could not be immediately reconciled.
The plan will be discussed at an upcoming NATO summit in Wales next week, the newspaper said.
The document explicitly lists Russia as a threat and says the boosting of NATO’s military presence in the east is tasked with protecting the alliance’s new members from Russia.
NATO publicly voiced plans to boost its eastern defenses last week, but gave no details. The organization expanded in the 1990s and 2000s to include Eastern European countries that were previously members of the Moscow-run Warsaw Pact.
Poland, the Baltic states and Canada — also a NATO member — called for a repeal of the 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act, Der Spiegel magazine said Sunday, citing unnamed sources at NATO and the German government.
NATO accused Russia last week of having dispatched a limited military contingent to eastern Ukraine to help the flagging pro-Russian insurgency there. Official Moscow denied backing the rebels, who pushed back official Kiev’s forces last week.
NATO suspended cooperation with Russia in May following the outbreak of civil strife in Ukraine.
Contact the author at a.eremenko@imedia.ru
Also in The Moscow Times on Aug 31:
Russia and Ukraine trade soldiers at border
From Reuters, Aug. 31 2014
Ukraine has handed over a group of captured Russian paratroops and Russia has returned 63 Ukrainian soldiers who crossed into its territory last week, Russian news agencies quoted a paratroop commander as saying. RIA Novosti quoted Russian Major-General Alexei Ragozin as saying the paratroops had been handed back after “very difficult” negotiations and after what he called an unacceptable delay.
Ukraine said last week it had captured 10 paratroops and presented them to the press as evidence that the Russian military is fighting alongside pro-Moscow separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. Russia said the men had crossed an unmarked section of the border by accident.
The handovers appeared to mark a slight easing in tension between the two countries after a sharp escalation late last week, when the rebels — supported, according to Kiev, by Russian armored columns — opened a new front in the fighting by capturing the southern coastal town of Novoazovsk.
Ukraine had previously said the men were on a “special mission” and had been detained for crossing the border illegally and supporting a “terrorist organization,” the term it uses to refer to the separatists. Its military spokesman mocked the idea they had “got lost like Little Red Riding Hood in the forest.”
Ragozin criticized Ukraine’s behavior over the incident. “I consider it unacceptable that our servicemen were detained by the Ukrainian side for so many days,” he said.
Ragozin said Russia, by contrast, had promptly returned ‘hundreds’ of Ukrainian soldiers who at various times have crossed the border when squeezed by rebel forces. He said the latest group of 63 had entered Russia on Wednesday.
“Our lads are upset about everything that happened. They will all receive the necessary psychological and other kinds of help. The lads will all be OK,” Ragozin said.
European Union leaders decided at a summit on Saturday to draw up proposals within a week for further sanctions against Russia in the light of mounting evidence of its military involvement in Ukraine, something Moscow continues to deny.
