Keeping Putin out of the Baltics.
Some interesting international intrigue has been playing out in Europe. Russia’s the bad guy; the hero, improbably, is France.
Early last year, as you may remember, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and ginned up a separatist movement in Ukraine’s east. Ever since, it has supported those separatists financially, with arms, and, sometimes, in battle.
When Russia started violating “21st-century norms,” the West responded with 1930s-style anti-aggression sanctions. As the EU worked out what its sanctions would include, France made sure they excluded two Mistral helicopter carriers that France was building, for which Russia had already paid nearly a billion dollars.
The deadline for the carriers’ delivery to Russia was last September. As the deadline approached, France suffered a stroke of conscience and announced that it wouldn’t deliver the ships until there was a ceasefire, and movement toward a political settlement, in East Ukraine. The September deadline came and went. Russia demanded the ships; France wouldn’t budge. Russia gave the French a new, December 1 deadline to turn the Mistrals over. That deadline came and went as well.
“What’s the big deal about helicopter carriers?” you might wonder. After all, Russia already has two real aircraft carriers, and a third under construction. The answer may appear in a wiki-leaked assessment of Russia’s Baltic fleet written by an intelligence company called Stratfor.
Like Ukraine, each of the three Baltic countries — Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia — has a large ethnic-Russian population. NATO, and any number of geopoliticos in the U.S. and Europe, believe that after East Ukraine joins Crimea and northern Georgia in Russia’s new empire, Putin plans a pivot to the Baltics. Last September, Russia held an enormous war game along the Latvian and Lithuanian borders. About the same time, Russian spies crossed into Estonia, kidnapped an Estonian intelligence officer, and tossed him in prison. (Where he remains. Free Eston Kohver!)
Russia’s threat to the Baltics is backed up by its Baltic fleet, which is based in Kaliningrad, the Russian Baltic-coast enclave sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. Kaliningrad is the focus of new military investment.
Give the French credit; they’re taking a big financial hit in order to do the right thing.
Shortly after its war game, Russia announced that it had finished building a massive early-warning radar assembly, which, according to the state-owned Sputnik News, “covers almost all of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, has a range of 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) and can simultaneously track up to 500 targets.” According to Moscow, it was ready for “full combat duty” by December. In January, Russia’s military chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov, announced that 2015 will be a year of “increasing the combat capabilities of [the Russian army’s] units and increasing combat strength in accordance with the military development plans. Special attention will be given to . . . the Kaliningrad region.”
Here’s the kicker: According to the wiki-leaked Stratfor analysis, if the Mistrals join Russia’s Baltic fleet, they will “[cut] deployment time [of Russian forces] to anywhere in the Baltic states from five days to 24 hours.”
So give the French credit; they’re taking a big financial hit in order to do the right thing. They will, evidently, repay Moscow’s money. (And, according to Le Figaro, if France can’t find another country to buy the ships, they may be scuttled — France is disinclined to spend more money refitting them for its own navy.)
Surprisingly, the Russians — who have lost two carriers and, according to the Moscow Times, are stuck with “a special batch of Ka-52 attack helicopters” specially designed “to fill them” — have responded to France’s hard line with conciliation. They will not seek any “penalties or fines” for the withheld Mistrals; Putin went so far as to say that he “assumes the current French leadership and the French generally are good people and will return our money.”
It’s a sad day when the U.S. gets lessons in courage from France.