Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Jarhead 2: US Marines who are always the 2nd echelon during the Sakhalin campaign, but who see combat during its closing stage.

forcon, if I was running Eastern gamble taking out the backfire force before you send the ampib forces in would have made sense. I am a history bluff and attacking russain soil is the best way to convience the Russian military to stand and fight.

One Hundred and Thirty–Four

The Russians put cruise missiles into the heart of the capital cities of five European nations. Berlin, London, Paris, Rome and Warsaw were all struck in the early hours of August 25th. Those weapons which hit the British, French and German capitals were launched by a couple of Tu-95 Bears when they were over the northern reaches of the Baltic. They flew onwards from the departing bombers through Swedish airspace and past NATO air defences near and far to their targets. A few were downed and others went of course: some got through. It was the same with those bound for the government districts in the Italian and Polish capitals with long flights and not all missiles reaching their targets. One Bear made its launches while above Belarus and the second when over the Black Sea. Those missiles bound for Rome had a long flight and crossed neutral Serb territory on the way. Like the Swedes, the Serbs had military forces on alert but were unable to stop these weapons. Belgrade and Stockholm would each afterwards receive very undiplomatic messages addressed to their heads of government: their prime ministers believed that those should have been sent to the Kremlin instead.


In Berlin, the Mitte District was stuck by four incoming missiles. The Reichstag building, housing the Bundestag, was smashed-up and so too was one wing of the Federal Chancellery. Two more missiles, off-course, struck the Humboldt University (not detonating) and within the open grounds of the Tiergarten… not very far from the Soviet War Memorial and causing some superficial damage to that impressive monument.

Whitehall was hit by three more missiles. There were a handful of Typhoon fighters flying from RAF Northolt in West London and they managed to get one missile in-flight to bring that down over the Essex countryside. RAF Regiment Rapier SAMs emplaced north of London in Epping Forest – a site selected for them to cover the 2012 Olympics – fired at others but failed to bring any of them down. Of those which got past British defences, two of the trio which made it struck the Cabinet Office (parts of the building collapsed into 10 Downing Street’s garden) and Foreign Office buildings. The third hit impacted three hundred yards short of the Houses of Parliament along the usually busy road which was Victoria Embankment.

Central Paris was hit by four Russian missiles. The Élysée Palace (the grounds, not the main presidential residence), the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, the French Defence Ministry and the Assemblee Nationale at the Palais Bourbon were all hit. Armée de l'Air Mirage-2000 fighters were in Parisian skies when the missiles came in but were too late to do anything but watch the explosions below. Other fighters had already taken down several inbound Russian weapons yet not these ones which got through.

Another three missiles reached Rome. The immense building which housed Italy’s defence ministry was one target with little real damage done here; the Palazzo Chigi was the second target, the official residence of the prime minister. One missile screeched in close but was just off course. It blew up when impacting the square in front of the building, hitting within the Piazza Colonna. In that square, the marble Column of Marcus Aurelius had stood for more than eighteen hundred years before today: it toppled over and was smashed to pieces. The last one hit the prime minister’s office building and caused major damage there.

Warsaw was struck by seven of those missiles. Previous Scud attacks by Belorussian forces had rained damage at random across the city but this was more targeted. Prime Minister Tusk had begged the Americans and the Dutch too for them to deploy Patriot missiles to defend his capital but those weapons were needed for protecting military sites. Slovakia had answered the call, sending a detached platoon from their lone battery of Russian-made (exported in the early Nineties) S-300PMU system. Those SA-10 Grumbles had beforehand failed to get any Scuds yet today they did take out two of those AS-15 Kents. There were those seven remaining ones though. Along Ujazdów Avenue, explosions rocked the Chancellery which housed Tusk’s official offices, the Ministry of Justice and also the Lithuanian Embassy: it was here where the government-in-exile from that occupied Baltic State was operating from. Elsewhere within the Śródmieście, Warsaw’s city centre, the defence and foreign ministry buildings were also hit. Two missiles ripped into buildings where the Polish Sejm and Senate were housed: neither of their meeting places were hit but there was great damage to the office complexes and a major fire started afterwards.

Other missiles had been taken out in-flight by NATO air defences or crashed to the ground miles away from these cities. Those that got through did their worst. Following the missile impacts upon these centres of government – the explosions came in the early hours meaning while there were people there, there weren’t as many as there were during daylight hours –, Russian official diplomatic messages came to these governments. Do not invade the sovereign soil of Russia or we will be forced to target your capital cities on a wider basis next time. Russia had shown that it could back up such threats with action. The intention was that these countries would decide not to invade the Rodina rather than face more of this.


Following the firing and then ‘accidental’ death of Fradkov, the retired Lt.–General Reshetnikov had replaced him as director of the SVR. Reshetnikov had previously left the SVR last year and taken up a post at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies: somewhere where he had only been busy. The RISS was no soft thinktank but rather a weapons design facility for the country: that weapon being information. Reshetnikov had been busy with those younger fellows there who were working on using information warfare in new and innovative ways for the 21st Century. Going back to the SVR meant that he would have to be replaced there and the Russian leadership would rue the day he left because to replace him came someone else less willing to listen to all of the smart youngsters there. Alas, the RISS was behind him. Reshetnikov was at the head of the SVR now. At his first meeting with the Russian Security Council, he presented to them something important from his agents in the field. An SVR officer had contact with a NATO officer who betrayed his own country to aid Russia… all for cold, hard cash. The latest information he passed on was that NATO’s just-starting Baltic Arrow operation planned for Kaliningrad to be invaded as the West aimed to liberate the Baltic States.

Like Sakhalin, and also the SEAL operations in the Kola, the Coalition wanted to put troops inside the Russia itself. Thus the air attacks were sent followed by those messages contained the threats. The American’s Avenging Eagle airstrikes had seen Engels Airbase deep inside the heart of the Rodina bombed with the destruction of several of the Tu-160 Blackjack bombers based there. Not all of them had been wiped out – despite claims that they had from the Pentagon – but only a few remained. There was the worry that using them to strike at the United States with another conventional attack may see them lost. Therefore, it would be a submarine attack made within the coming days against the US mainland when it came to telling the Americans that they too would suffer like the Europeans for daring to put their men into Russia. That delay had initially infuriated some of those within Putin’s junta yet this view had changed with reflection. Patrushev had assured his colleagues that the cries of the Europeans would get the Americans attention first on this matter to lead them to decide that going into Kaliningrad was out of the question, which would only be reinforced after another strike on their own homeland had been made to ‘persuade’ them of that.

Nods of the head had come. The Security Council was in agreement at the wisdom of such thinking. The Americans would realise the mistakes they had made and see sense.

They hadn’t been in complete agreement on the air strikes undertaken against European capitals though. Britain and France were nuclear powers. Missiles which had conventional warheads, but could have easily contained thermonuclear ones, had just been shot at their capital cities. This was something that others had deemed too risky. There was the Rome issue as well. Neither the prime minister’s office nor the defence ministry were near the Vatican City though one of the missiles which didn’t get through – brought down over the Adriatic Sea by the Italian Air Force – had been lancing towards the foreign ministry building. It didn’t make it in the end though the targeting of that had caused some concern. Before the war and since it started, there had been calls from the Holy See for a diplomatic solution and an end to fighting. Pope Benedict XVI, one of many international figures making this call, had been called a ‘Nazi’ by foreign minister Kozak. That hadn’t fussed the majority of his colleagues but it had received a poor reaction elsewhere in the world. What if one of those missiles heading into Rome went off-course and hit the Vatican…? In the end it didn’t (the Russian military didn’t know that the Italians had shot down the foreign ministry bound cruise missile) but it had caused tension. There were other matters with Italy too. Italian neutrality in this conflict, based upon the blackmail of Berlusconi, had eventually turned completely around into Italy honouring its NATO commitments. Berlusconi’s fall didn’t mean that Italy would do that though: there had been some in Moscow who thought that Frattini was a reasonable man, someone who could be persuaded not to go to war. However, straight after his assumption of power, Italy had been attacked. The GRU had people in Italy – sleeper cells – who had at once sprung into action. They had undertaken terror attacks against civilian-military infrastructure and killed many Italians. The orders had gone out from the Security Council though without everyone on that body being aware.


In the grand scheme of things, did this really matter?

Russia was at war with the United States, NATO and other countries which had joined the Coalition. What did it matter if Italy was another nation that they were fighting? It mattered to some people though, especially since the Italians had at once jumped in with two feet. That was something that some though could be avoided… along with many other perceived mistakes.

Who were these people? Chief among them were Shoygu and Lt.–General Gerasimov. The Minister for Emergency Situations and the C-in-C of the Russian Ground Forces had been having meetings about their concerns. It was the job of the Bortnikov-led FSB to make sure that any meetings like those were known about and any ideas of disloyalty to the leadership be crushed. Well… Bortnikov was meeting with Shoygu and Gerasimov. They weren’t discussing a coup. There was none of that. Bortnikov, Medvedev’s chosen man who’d then turned on him when Putin re-established his power, he who organised that coup last year, would not be party to that. What they discussed in secret was how to reign in some of the extremes of their colleagues. When it came to Colonel–General Makarov, Gerasimov believed that his fellow general – with whom he had joined with in bringing down Medvedev – and who now was the C-in-C of the armed forces as a whole was making error after error; he was running the show, not Zubkov who was meant to be the defence minister. Naturally, Gerasimov would have done things better. Russia wouldn’t be on the back foot, he said, if he was listened to. Shoygu was concerned over what he called the madness of the activities undertaken by the GRU head, General Shlyakhturov, with those over-the-top killings across Europe of exiles and the recent bombings in Italy chief among them. Shoygu had his hands full still dealing with the fallout from the leak of biological weapons around St. Petersburg, where he and so many of the siloviki who ran Russia had connections too, and blamed members of the Security Council for not taking that as serious as it really was. They denied his resources and he had to fight for everything with them.

Kozak worried them both. Calling the Pope a Nazi had been followed by the release of false information – supplied by Shlyakhturov and promoted too by prime minister Ivanov – which implicated Benedict in supposed war crimes back in 1945 following his forced service in the German military at the end of the last war. No one was going to believe it and they both thought that it only made Russia look bad. Moreover, things which were true which Russia told the world as part of its propaganda war would look as false as the lies about the Pope. In America, their media was already calling Kozak ‘Dumb Dmitri’: or ‘Dmitri the D**khead’ when they chose to be less polite (the name came to prominence via Fox News). He was compared to the deceased Saddam’s spokesman ‘Comical Ali’ in this regard.

Criticism of Putin wasn’t something that neither of them made in front of Bortnikov. Instead, that was directed at others around their president. Patrushev was the largest target of their expressed ire. He continued to head Security Council meetings and it was Patrushev who Shoygu & Gerasimov believed was responsible for Fradkov’s death as well as keeping Putin away from dissenting voices outside that decision-making body. Commonwealth of Independent States head Lebedev – an old colleague of Putin who now headed up relations between allies – and also the sacked former foreign minister Lavrov, again someone who had once had much influence with the president, had been turned away from requested meetings with Putin at Patrushev’s insistence. Patrushev was silencing dissent. Bortnikov knew about the silencing of others (he also didn’t let Shoygu & Gerasimov know that it was he, not Shlyakhturov, who had killed Fradkov) and was worried that Lebedev and Lavrov might be silenced that way too. Shoygu, Gerasimov and Bortnikov all had something else that they agreed upon as well: something of even more importance they believed. This war against the West had been launched to stop and invasion. The tide had been turned and now an invasion was underway. How had this mistake come about and who was to blame? Patrushev was the focus of that when the trio spoke of who to apportion blame to yet each silently believed that while they despised him, it really wasn’t him, was it? No, it was someone else… their president.

Bortnikov told those who were oh so not his co-conspirators that there wouldn’t be any more killings like that of Fradkov anymore. As the head of the FSB, an organisation which he had full control of, he was in the position to make sure that Patrushev or Shlyakhturov might be able to order something like that but it would never happen unless he wanted it to. Power, real power, was in Bortnikov’s hands. If anyone else was going to die, it would only because he would allow it to happen.

james, the russians been hitting targets in the mainland usa snice the war started and every time the American countered with a attack that did more damage then the russain attack. Kaliningrad is one of the few areas in Russian hnds pre war that the Europeans would consider taking out to remove a military base that is blocking freeing allied members and taking out weapons being used to hit allied military and civilian targets in Europe.

It indeed looks like the Russians are suffering from the typical misconception about the western democracies being weak and feeble, even though they in fact are the most resilient states in the world. These are countries without any kind of reasonable fear of a coup or the like and they have massive reserves of wealth, knowledge, and people.

And such states certainly don't give in to a few bombs.

I'll overlook those problems as long as you issue us a refund.