Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Eighty–Eight

Terrorism continued within the Baltic States… or the fight for liberation by brave freedom fighters went onwards. How one wanted to look at the situation which was ongoing through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania depended upon your point of view when it came to the situation with the joint Russian-Belorussian occupation of these three nations. Were those setting off bombs and killing people terrorists or the Resistance? Russian state propaganda was asserting that they were certainly terrorists. Statements coming out of Moscow declared that they were and there was on-the-ground coverage of the situation from media teams where they too pumped out the message that this was terrorism. What was occurring had all the recognizable hallmarks of such a thing. However, the counter to all of this, coming from the Coalition – though one which the Western media was carefully questioning – was the position that this was a legitimate series of strikes made by those fighting for their freedom; it was also said that many of the worst instances, the ones really played up by Russia, were in fact false flag attacks. The claim there being that Russia’s intelligence organs were committing those and blaming them on ‘terrorists’ all as part of its propaganda war. One of the terrorist outrages which attention was directed towards took place on the morning of the war’s sixth day. There was an explosion in the late morning within Tallinn. There had been small bomb blasts in the previous days in the Estonia capital, including those which occurred in areas of the city which could be considered Russian due to their ethnic makeup, but nothing on this scale. A five-story building was part-demolished as a third of it came down due to an explosion in the basement. The building was a hotel and one which occupation authorities had forced citizens of Coalition countries to stay in while they remained in Tallinn and unable to leave. There was no warning of the explosion. A lot of people in the immediate aftermath believed that maybe it had been hit with a missile: stories in the media had said that NATO missiles had crashed into other sites, killing further innocents. With this hotel though, there was a quick announcement that this was no missile attack. NATO wasn’t killing civilians this time but Estonian terrorists were. The civilians which they killed were Westerners too. The story told, by Russian media teams fast on the ground and given fantastic access all over what was a crime scene, was that those terrorists had been out to kill Russian and Belorussians soldiers in the lobby and also in the immediate area. Five of them were reportedly killed along with three Estonians – maybe these were part of the ‘terror cell’ came the speculation from Moscow’s agents – as well as sixty-four Westerners. The latter came from many nations. There were men, women and children among them. Many had dual-nationality with family members in Estonia who they had been with when the war started though others had been in the country for other reasons even when travel advisory notices had been issued in the lead-up to conflict. Like others across the Baltic States, they were stuck now in these countries. The Russians hadn’t evacuated these civilians like they had done so with those who had been inside Russia when the war started. Instead, they had been forced to report to the occupation authorities and confined to certain areas. Many of those places were near what could very well be regarded as sites which NATO would want to attack with air strikes. Thousands of human shields were spread across these occupied nations with no hint of any exit date for them. Statements from Moscow concerning the fate of these people were few but when mentioned, it was said that fears for their safety was why they remained where they were. NATO air and missile attacks, the Russian foreign ministry had said, put the movement of those people in danger. Today, sixty-four of them died in Tallinn but they weren’t the first and neither would they be the last.

A RQ-4 Global Hawk, one of the US Air Force’s many reconnaissance drones, had overflown the Baltic States yesterday – gaining images of that one hotel among many where known human shields were held – and the same unmanned aircraft today flew on a different mission where it was in skies to the south. This aircraft was on a flight above the Ukraine and undertaking a huge surveillance task with it. Large parts of the western parts of that nation were observed from above where the Global Hawk used its radar and its other sensors. Real-time intelligence was then fed onwards to a satellite. What the American drone was looking at was the Ukrainian military’s deployments. They had mobilised upon the outbreak of war yet stayed out of the conflict without making an official announcement about where they stood on the issue of neutrality. For a neutral nation, Ukraine certainly wasn’t acting like one in the eyes of the Coalition. Part of its army was on the Polish border and this tied down NATO forces from fighting the Russians & Belorussias in Poland. Other parts of the Ukrainian army were facing Romania and Moldova. It could be argued that the Ukraine feared being dragged into the war and these were only defensive moves that was a possibility but so too was that at the most opportune moment for the Kremlin, the Ukraine would enter the wider war. Other Ukrainian actions with its aircraft and ships, plus how the Ukraine had allowed passports to be used by Russian operatives, had shown that Kiev was not friendly towards the West. NATO and the Coalition didn’t know for certain what would happen. They didn’t want to be caught with their pants down on this and so acted accordingly. American satellites had overflown the country but there was only so much that they could see. A Global Hawk could appear away from the plotted paths of reconnaissance satellites to gain intelligence unexpectedly. The drone was fired upon while it overflew the Ukraine. Radar detection followed the launch of SAMs and these were in the form of S-300s: SA-10 Grumbles. NATO aircraft had been fired upon by these weapons where they were fighting Russia & Belarus and suffered losses while doing so. However, the S-300s in Ukrainian service preformed extremely poorly. They were older versions of the system but still… Maintenance and upgrades on these weapons had been neglected and the same could be said of the training. A distant E-3 Sentry aircraft (this one being a US Air Force one which survived when others were targeted by Spetsnaz at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma) was flying back over Slovakia when the Global Hawk was on its mission. The fighter controllers aboard, those concerned about an attack coming towards them using those super-long-range KS-172 missiles that the Russians had used several times now, watched as a pair of Ukrainian Su-27s lifted off from their airbase with the clear intent to intercept the drone. One of those fighters quickly returned to base for reasons unknown. As to the other fighter, it took a terribly long time to get anywhere near the drone and then made a failed attempt to fire upon the Global Hawk: it too then returned to base with haste. NATO considered afterwards what was going on. Intelligence analysts judged that the Russians had detected the drone and passed the information onto the Ukrainians due to what must be some sort of bilateral emergency defence agreement. Like with their SAMs, the Ukrainian’s fighters, even their supposedly best ones as the Su-27s should have been, were not in a fit state to see any real action. A dissenting opinion, one noted by senior officers and not rejected completely out of hand, was that Kiev was putting on a ‘show’ for the Russians and purposely avoiding direct conflict with NATO while promising fidelity to Moscow. With both of these viewpoints, this had all sorts of implications for the short- & long-term in both the military and geopolitical sense when it came to the ongoing wider war.

Ukrainian forces weren’t involved in the fighting in Moldova. They had six full-strength heavy brigades on the Ukrainian-Moldovan border (or Ukrainian-Transnistrian frontier if that was how you wanted to view it) – an impressive force on paper yet so too was their force of SAMs and fighters – yet those stayed back in their own country. It was only Transnistrian and Russian forces fighting inside Moldova. Moldova had joined the Coalition not by choice but due to that invasion. NATO forces moved into their country to join them in repelling this. One Romanian division plus the small mixed NATO brigade were present leaving the rest of the Romanian Army along with Bulgarian forces which had come north out of the fight: they were in-position to defend against an Ukrainian invasion into the Balkans. This latter effort tied up a significant number of NATO forces. It wasn’t just the troops on the frontline but those behind them and also air power. All of this would have been mightily useful in Poland. Romania and Bulgaria also had the issue of the Black Sea being a Russian military lake now so they might not have been able to send significant forces to Poland if there was no stand-off with the Ukraine, but they were currently sending none at all because of the uncertainty over what the Ukraine might do. When it came to the actual fight inside Moldova, the frontlines there had stabilized from initial entry made into now a bloody, static stalemate. Very little progress forward had been made by the attacking forces. There was no danger of Moldova falling and from there an invasion moving forward into Romania. Russian paratroopers sent there to join long-establish ‘peacekeeping troops’ hadn’t made the difference which the Kremlin had hoped that they would alongside the Transnistrians. When it came to the locals, it could be said that their heart wasn’t into it. Their leaders in Tiraspol had signed up to it but they hadn’t. Things would have been different if they were fighting off a Moldovan invasion into their own breakaway country. Morale problems were getting worse and an increase in punishments for breaches of discipline had failed to get anywhere. There had been murders of officers and men firing their weapons away from the enemy rather than at them. Full-scale munity didn’t look likely at this time but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t happen in the future if the men stayed here inside Moldova trying to push forward against insurmountable odds. Yet they wouldn’t be doing so for long. The Romanians were putting together a counterattack, using a lot of armour as the center-piece of that, to aid the Moldovans in liberating their soil. The fight looked likely soon to be moving back into Transnistria and their soldiers would surely fight better there than here.

I was going to have him hiding in his villa but that didn't seem right. Whether he is genuine when he says he wants to lead a peace effort is something I left open. Everyone thinks he is acting for Russia now so that doesn't matter. My thinking is that with Napolitano, his actions are to stop his nation's humiliation and so he is anti Russian rather than pro NATO.

Nope, not at all. I am adding a story only thread there as you asked me to do the other month. It will take some time to add the story there.

Eighty-Nine

Britain hadn’t started this war, but she was going to fight it until the very end. That was the sentiment that was portrayed by Prime Minister Cameron and his deputies in the national unity government, Nick Clegg and Harriet Harman. The British homeland had been attacked by missiles and commandos and British forces overseas had been thrust into a fight that they were not prepared for, against a foe that outnumbered them across the front; this had been fatal for the UK’s troops in Latvia under the multinational NATO brigade which had been stationed there, and many thousands more servicemen and women had died in Poland, in Norway, at sea and within the British isles as well. There were hundreds of civilian casualties from large-scale air raids which were continuing against Britain as the fighting on the continent went on, and there were Russian Spetsnaz teams believed to still be active within the UK too. All of this created a terrible domestic situation for the government to deal with. There was pressure from both the far-left and some elements within the radical right such as the British National Party to withdraw British forces from the fighting. The media, while not being officially censored, was under pressure from MI5 to keep up national morale and was making some effort to do so, but the evening news never failed to air footage of sinking warships and burning buildings. Though the number of anti-war protests was fairly small, those that did occur would almost always collapse into violence as hooligans and thugs hijacked legitimate movements, seeking to cause chaos and profit for themselves in doing so. The police response in countering this was equally violent.

Those scenes witnessed in Russia back at the end of 2008 weren’t repeated on the streets of London or Manchester, but riot police would ruthlessly put down large disturbances, earning themselves little popularity as they did so. The ongoing fear of an impending nuclear exchange had led to many instances of absenteeism in the workplace as thousands of civilians fled from major population centres, clogging up roads that were needed for military usage.

The domestic situation was quite grave, but not utterly hopeless. The government, after talking with many chief constables from around the country, had decided that general usage of the Armed Forces to deal with the unrest would be a dramatic overreaction and would only worsen the situation. Besides, those troops were needed in Europe, not gunning down looters outside corner shops. The military chiefs of staff, split between the Ministry of Defence in London and the deep-underground facility at Northwood, north-west of the capital, agreed with this sentiment.

British Special Forces from the SAS and Special Reconnaissance Regiment were deployed in significant numbers to support counter-terrorism police units in rounding up suspected enemy infiltrators, however, with many successes being met but some failures too. Spetsnaz commandos had been captured when they had attempted to raid RAF Kinloss up in Scotland on the first night of the war. That attack had seen some success but the mission had ultimately been a failure for those involved, with many of the commandos killed and a few taken as prisoners. As they had not been wearing military uniforms when they had struck, those enemy soldiers were not afforded the rights given to Prisoners of War by the Geneva & Hague Conventions and thus MI5, MI6 and Britain’s military intelligence forces could interrogate them as they pleased. Outright torture was seen as a poor choice of interrogation method due to its lack of reliability, but those Spetsnaz men captured were subject to extreme amounts of discomfort and confusion in attempts to elicit information from them.

From these prisoners, the British Army’s Intelligence Corps was able to ascertain the whereabouts of another Spetsnaz unit operating within Great Britain and what its planned target was. Originally, that team had been in place for the purpose of striking RAF Waddington or perhaps shooting down the E-3 Sentry aircraft there with shoulder-launched missiles as they took off, but intelligence had come in to the GRU that such high-value air assets had now been moved to Poland, leaving the assault team tapped for RAF Waddington without a target. Instead, they had gone to ground for use at a later date where their efforts would be more useful. The target of that Spetsnaz team was revealed to be RAF Menwith Hill. Menwith Hill was not, despite its name, a British-run facility but rather a listening post operated by the United States Air Force. The Americans had expected an air of Spetsnaz attack against their listening post earlier in the war but it had so far been left alone, much to the confusion of the US Air Force. Menwith Hill provided a vast array of listening and intelligence capabilities to NATO, and could be used to track Russian communications and decipher signals intelligence picked up elsewhere.

When the planned attack on that American-run facility was discovered, it was immediately reported up to the British government. The cabinet was undergoing daily briefings from Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of Defence Staff, and from Defence Secretary Davis & Armed Forces Minister Admiral West too. The news they received was rarely good, but the presence of yet another Spetsnaz element on British soil was the key concern of the briefing that day.

The SAS and police firearms teams had put great effort into rounding up potential Russian agents and traitors working for the GRU or SVR, but still the Russian commandos had managed to slip through the net and were preparing to strike once again. The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir David Richards, was the head of the British Army and by default he held indirect command of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment. There were official channels that the government would through to authorise military deployments within the UK and those concerning Special Forces, however it was Richards who briefed the government and advised them on the course of action to take. The Director of Special Forces (DSF) would ideally be the one to take this role, but he was busy coordinating operations with Maj.-General Thomas over in Poland.


The SAS’s counter-revolutionary warfare team hit a safe-house within the city but came up empty with nobody there. Defence Intelligence had been tipped off about this building and its use by a captured Spetsnaz man but there was nobody there when it was occupied by the security forces. However, many signs of the presence of enemy troops were discovered. The intelligence had been accurate but the timing had been wrong.

Moments after the SAS raid, a white van attempting to leave Harrogate was engaged by police firearms officers and some Army personnel…

The van skidded to a halt and four men disembarked, with two of their number being cut down providing covering fire for the other two as they ran for cover. The shooting lasted for a matter of only a few minutes, but when it was over, four police officers and two British soldiers were dead, along with a civilian who happened to be passing by. All four of those suspected enemy troops had been killed but the fight had been a bloody mess, and British intelligence new full-well that there had been more than four enemy soldiers in Yorkshire.

It wasn’t long before another suspect vehicle was located outside of Harrogate and headed towards Menwith Hill. That vehicle had apparently escaped before the town had been cordoned off but it wouldn’t be allowed to get very far; the SAS conducted an enforced stop in their armoured Rangerovers. The Spetsnaz reacted well and started laying down fire as they SAS men emerged from their own vehicles and moved to subdue their opponents. Gunfire illuminated the early-morning haze. Over six hundred rounds were fired and seven grenades detonated in the shootout; four out of the six occupants of the vehicle were dead and the other two captured, with a pair of British SAS soldiers dead in the firefight as well.

For readers who want to read the story only thread, it is here:
alternate-timelines.proboards.com/thread/2558/eagle-guardian-story-thread
We are adding bits to it between us and will catch up soon enough.

Can it just stay there please?
Great banner! We'll be seeing a Blackjack or two soon!

The US put its B-2s over Russia and hit St. Petersburg. Therefore, Russia will respond accordingly. That will be on Sunday.