Nineteen The ongoing crisis between Russia and the west was reaching a head. In the Kremlin, President Putin had surrounded himself with advisors whose loyalty to him was unquestionable. Part of that loyalty included agreeing with his decisions and ensuring that those who didn’t were silenced. The Federal Security Service under Director Bortnikov saw to this, using both its legal powers and through ensuring that
kompromat was available on those who might threaten the President’s authority. The idea that war between Russia and the West was an inevitability was gaining credence in Moscow after the NATO deployment into the Baltic States. Putin and his subordinates had no particular desire to start a war, given the overall superiority of the combined NATO armed forces, but if one was going to be fought regardless, then Russian doctrine dictated that it be fought on somebody else’s soil. Though the Autumn Movement had been totally decimated by the crackdown that had followed Putin’s
coup, some street protests still took place, albeit under the watchful eyes of the
Militsiya. The Kremlin believed that the resurgence of the movement was only a matter of time as the quality of life in Russia continued to decline. Tensions with the West simmered further with Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian election, ensuring that ‘their’ candidate had come to power in Kiev over a more pro-western figure who might have taken Ukraine into NATO or the European Union. Though Moscow alleged that NATO was continuing to undermine Russia’s legitimate government, it also believed that the Alliance was fundamentally weak. Though previous operations against the Baltic States had failed to break the Euro-American alliance at the seams, Moscow wanted to keep up the pressure, hoping to cause further diplomatic fractures. NATO was overstretched and overburdened after years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, although the latter had not actually involved NATO as an alliance, but rather several of its members acting independently. Westerners were also casualty-averse, the generals told Putin. It had taken nearly a decade of fighting in Afghanistan for the U.S. Military to experience even a fraction of the casualties that could be sustained in a major war with Russia. Losing thousands of men per day for the sake of a few countries which most Americans couldn’t find on a map would break NATO apart. Or so was the idea anyway. A peaceful solution to the crisis was still sought in Moscow, but by now President Putin was ordering his military advisors to begin looking into pre-written plans should other options be decided upon.
At the end of February 2010, Putin ordered that a partial mobilisation of the Russian Armed Forces take place. This wasn’t a full-scale mobilisation that would move the entirety of the
Rodina to a wartime economy, but rather the large-scale call-up of troops and a series of preliminary deployments. The purpose of this mobilisation was firstly to prepare Russia for the prospect of fighting a war with NATO, and secondly to intimidate NATO into backing away from its latest bout of economic sanctions. With an economy that was already incredibly fragile, Russia couldn’t afford a full wartime mobilisation unless a war really was going to happen. At this time, there were still options for peace that were being explored and the prospect of going to war wasn’t really thought of as a realistic possibility. The implementation of the mobilisation was merely a preparatory step to ensure that Russia was ready in case that changed. From Moscow, it was easy to see NATO as a force of so-called ‘American Imperialism’. First the government of Yugoslavia had been toppled, then Afghanistan had been taken over, and then Saddam Hussein had been ousted by the might of the American Military. Who was to say Russian allies such as Belarus or even Russia itself would not be next on the list of victims? The pattern of anti-Western governments being brought down was all too clear to President Putin. There was, of course, a major disruption of civilian life with the mobilisation beginning, as many men were dragged away from their day jobs to return to the Armed Forces. Nevertheless, with the Autumn Movement in tatters and many thousands of its organisers imprisoned, there was little that dissenters could do.
The first step of the partial mobilisation was to call up nearly 300,000 military reservists from all walks of life. Since Russia had always had a conscript army, virtually all men had received military training in one form or another at some point in their lives. These reservists had completed their mandatory two-year conscription period, but the Russian government was well within its legal authority to bring them back into service. They had received some refresher training after leaving the military, as these particular individuals being called up for duty were those who volunteered to remain as reservists. More could be called up who did not wish to be; that order was not implemented yet. The reservists would need large amounts of refresher training and many reserve ‘cadre’ formations of the Russian Armed Forces were woefully underequipped. Though the active-duty formations had seen major improvements in the quality of equipment they were to use since the Georgia War in 2008, the reservists would often arrive at their garrisons to find that weapons and kit had disappeared, having been lost or stolen by incompetent or corrupt officers. It would take time for issues such as this one to be resolved, but the soldiers themselves were able to begin refresher training relatively quickly.
Other military moves included the sending of a number of warships from the Russian Pacific Fleet around the Arctic to the Northern Fleet bases on the Kola Peninsula. Amongst the almost twenty ships sent to carry out the perilous journey through the frozen North were several amphibious warfare vessels designed to carry naval infantry to their targets. Under Russian war plans, such ships would be needed to carry marines to and from targets around the North Cape of Norway and in the Baltic Sea. The Northern Fleet found itself lacking the ability to transport the full load of its men and their heavy equipment, as did the Baltic Fleet. Thus, ships from the Pacific were sent north and then west to provide a boost to the amphibious capabilities of those regions. In the Norwegian Sea, the Royal Navy and the Royal Norwegian Navy tracked Russian naval movements. American and British nuclear powered hunter-killer submarines along with the Norwegian diesel-powered vessels tailed Russian warships, gathering intelligence about their numbers and capabilities. On numerous occasions, both sides chased one another around the frozen Atlantic waters in a series of hair-raising games of cat-and-mouse.
Another area of concern and potential weakness to Moscow was Central Asia. Though Russia maintained a cordial relationship with most nations in that troubled region through the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), it was feared that governments there could turn on Moscow at any moment. The Russian Ground Forces already had the 201st Motorised Rifle Division based in Tajikistan, bordering the NATO-occupied Afghanistan, keeping an eye on the situation in that region. The Defence Ministry convinced President Putin to authorise the deployment of the 7th Guards Air Assault Division to reinforce the ground troops already based in Tajikistan. The men and equipment of a whole air assault division suddenly going to the Tajik border with Afghanistan was a major shock both to NATO and to Russian ‘allies’ in the CSTO. The speed with which those men were deployed impressed even the United States Military. The sudden movement of 12,000 troops by air was no easy task, and yet the supposedly decrepit Russian Air Force had managed it with little warning time to prepare. From hideouts in the remote northern regions of Afghanistan, NATO special operations units could observe Russian Il-76 & An-124 transport planes flying overhead and Russian paratroopers carrying out exercises near the border.
President Putin called all of this a defensive measure meant to protect the sovereignty of not only Russia but of her allies too. The call-up of reserves could be attributed to the need to maintain law and order following President Medvedev’s assassination and the supposed Western conspiracy to depose the Russian government and replace it with a pro-Western one. The troops being flown to Tajikistan were there to keep a lid on potential riots and terrorist movements operating in the region, an idea which was given tacit support from the governments of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As for the naval deployments in the North Atlantic, they were taking place solely to reaffirm Russia’s commitment to protecting its waters from potential spy-ships and even things such as poachers. As the Defence Intelligence Agency would note,
Sovremenny-class destroyers was a hell of a lot of firepower to deal with poachers! The North Atlantic Council met once again, a week after the beginnings of the partial mobilisation in Russia. NATO’s political leadership did not buy into Putin’s story about the whole thing being a way of keeping a lid on internal resistance. It was simply too much firepower being brought to bear simply to crack down political opposition or protestors, and there were no signs in the West that Russia was facing anything along the lines of a civil war. However, neither did anybody in NATO believe it to be the prelude to a war. Even the most hawkish western governments felt that what was being witnessed was taking place as an act of intimidation, aimed at causing Brussels to rethink its strategy when it came to containing Russia. In this assumption, they were largely correct; the Kremlin had hoped that such a display of firepower, undertaken at great cost to the Russian economy, would be sure to make NATO back down from its deployment into the Baltic States.
Politically, the idea of the whole of NATO launching a full-scale military mobilisation was not viable at this point. That could only happen if the world was truly on the eve of war, and even then it might it might not take place. The political willpower to do so simply wasn’t there, either in the eyes of governments or in the eyes of their populations. The Baltic States didn’t even call up their forces, though Estonia did begin looking at plans to double the strength of its land forces by adding another infantry brigade to its order of battle. Those military deployments that did occur from NATO were organised not through the alliance’ command structure, but rather by individual nations acting independently; specifically, the United States & the French Republic. American soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment moved into Poland to bolster NATO’s ‘tripwire force’ in the region, remaining in the west of the country to avoid unnecessary conflagration. Meanwhile, President Sarkozy of France personally authorised the deployment of a squadron of
Mirage-2000C warplanes to Lithuania. In Brussels, a plan known as Operation EAGLE GUARDIAN was presented to the alliance political leadership. This included NATO’s Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as well as each nations’ ambassador to the alliance, and several foreign ministers and secretaries from around Europe and North America. EAGLE GUARDIAN had existed since 2007 as a general plan for defending Poland from a potential Russian invasion out of Belarus. Since the war of 2008, NATO had expanded the plan to include the defence of the three Baltic States in several different invasion scenarios. The battle plan highlighted NATO units that could be deployed to the warzone and how long each of these formations would take to get there, as well as potential transport routes over the European landmass. Airports and harbours in Germany, France and the Low Countries were singled out as vital landing sites for American, Canadian and British reinforcements, while fighter squadrons to sortie from Polish and Czech airfields were also identified. It was comprehensive war plan to defeat Russia.
The North Atlantic Council signed off on the EAGLE GUARDIAN battle plan on March 9th, 2010.
