Gangsta’s Paradise. Attention-seeking Trump thought he would use his influence with Putin count toward his pathetic experience as a diplomatic negotiator. Doubtless Putin was grateful no one is noticing self-sabotage including a pipeline explosion and a conscription campaign now trying to close borders to keep people in Russia.
Since Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has been peeling military forces away from its bases in Northern Europe to plug gaps in its forces suffering high losses and battlefield setbacks against Ukrainian troops.
Of an original estimated 30,000 Russian troops that once faced the Baltic countries and southern Finland, as many as 80 percent of them have been diverted to Ukraine, according to three senior European defense officials in the region, leaving Russia with only a skeleton crew in what was once its densest concentration of military force facing NATO territory.
“The drawdown we’ve seen from this region in the past seven months is very significant,” said one senior Nordic defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. “Russia had this ground force posture facing us for decades that is now effectively just gone.”
The official stressed that Russia’s air power in the region hadn’t changed and that Russia’s Northern Fleet—the crown jewel of its naval power, which is based in the Kola Peninsula—has remained relatively untouched. But Russia is moving other high-end military hardware, including antiaircraft systems and missiles, away from the region to Ukraine alongside its troops. Russia appeared to remove some S-300 antiaircraft systems from a protective ring around St. Petersburg, one of Russia’s largest cities that is near Finland’s border, according to satellite imagery obtained by Finnish media outlet Yle this month. One missile basing area in the region, manned by Russia’s 500th Antiaircraft Missile Regiment, appeared to be abandoned entirely, according to the satellite imagery.
“The reasons are twofold and pretty simple,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas told Foreign Policy. “These forces were used to generate sufficient combat power for the initial invasion in February. As Russian forces were sustaining heavy losses in theater, they had to be replaced [and] restored during the fight.”
The new estimates on the changing ground forces shed light on how the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s steep battlefield losses are altering the military map in Europe well beyond Ukraine’s borders. Now, defense officials across the Nordic-Baltic region are questioning how, and when, Russia could ever reconstitute its military forces along NATO’s northeastern flank, particularly as Finland and Sweden stand poised to join NATO. Slovakia on Tuesday became the 28th NATO member to ratify Finland and Sweden’s NATO accession, leaving Turkey and Hungary as the final two countries in the bloc to approve the next round of NATO expansion.
Current and former U.S. and European defense officials who spoke to Foreign Policy stressed that Russia remains a long-term threat to the region, particularly to the small Baltic states, and that they expect Moscow to reconstitute its military strength in the Russian Western military district in the long run irrespective of how the war in Ukraine goes.
[...]
A significant number of the Russian forces pulled away from the region are in Russia’s 6th Army, which until recently had been responsible for fighting in the Kremlin-occupied Kharkiv Oblast that has been overrun by a lightning Ukrainian counteroffensive in the last month. The 6th Army is typically tasked with defending Russia’s border along with the Baltic States and Finland.
“The redeployment of ground forces has been necessary because there is a desperate shortage of trained soldiers,” wrote Harri Ohra-aho, an intelligence advisor to the Finnish defense ministry and the former uniformed chief of defense intelligence, in an email. “It has nothing to do with the NATO threat (which hasn’t existed except in the rhetoric of the Russian leadership).”
Anusauskas, the Lithuanian defense minister, said a number of Russian units from the Kaliningrad Oblast, the small Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland, have also deployed to Ukraine. Before the war in Ukraine, Russia had around 12,000 ground and airborne troops in Kaliningrad and 18,000 ground and airborne troops, along with hundreds of tanks and other heavy military vehicles, in western Russia near the Baltic and Finnish borders, according to a publicly released assessment from the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service.
[...]
Russia’s grave troop shortages, which have forced Putin to declare a snap partial mobilization of Russian military reservists that appears to have stretched deep into Russian society, also forced the Kremlin to cobble together atypical units for ground combat in Ukraine. Several defense officials from the Baltic countries said Russia’s Baltic Fleet has sent its personnel into Ukraine as ground combat units because they are losing infantry with inordinately high casualty rates. Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters.
If and when Russia reconstitutes its forces along the Nordic-Baltic borders, it will face a new map of Europe, with Finland and Sweden both expected to join the alliance in the coming months. “With [Finland and Sweden in NATO], we have acquired a strategic depth,” said Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks. “We can turn the Baltic Sea into a ‘NATO lake,’ and the possibility of any Russian attack from the sea, from the West, is no longer a risk. Our backyard is much safer with Finland and Sweden as allies.”
foreignpolicy.com/...
2) ➡️ Last Wednesday, Putin announced a “partial” mobilization ordering 300,000 able-bodied men aged 18 to 30 in the military reserves to fight in Ukraine.
It sparked widespread protests across the country.
3) “I consider it necessary to make [this] decision, which is fully appropriate to the threats we face…to protect our motherland…to ensure the safety of our people and people in the liberated territories,” Putin said last week.
4) In the days that followed, Russian police arrested over 2,300 citizens for protesting, and tens of thousands of Russians have now fled the country to avoid the draft.
bit.ly/3UGn0Vv
5) Now, Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev is warning that Putin’s mobilization will have “truly catastrophic consequences.”
Including the death of the Russian economy and the downfall of Putin’s regime.
6) 🗣️ “The Russian economy is going to die by winter, I wrote in early March. Now I think I was right,” Inozemtsev said.
bit.ly/3UGn0Vv
7) Putin’s mobilization decree has already proved highly unpopular in Russia, prompting mass rallies and protest actions.
8) “The mobilization announced on Sept. 21 was a milestone that really divided Russian history into ‘before’ and ‘after’—an event that began the final countdown of Putin’s era,” Inozemtsev said.
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