Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Partially. While the plan is defensive, Moscow fears it will be used to support a revolution in Russia against Putin; even the most nationalistic Russian officials don't think NATO will drive on Moscow. The fear of a colour revolution is there though and very present.

I am! Will there be Sabaton?

Well, The Smiths are more up my street but I shall see what I can do! I'll post it when I have the list together. 

Twenty

President Alexander Lukashenko had been in power in Belarus since 1994. For all of that time, he had kept an iron grip on power within the nation. This post-Soviet state in many ways acted as if communism had never come to an end though in other aspects of Lukashenko’s rule there were marked differences. Lukashenko was a strongman dictator whose repeated instances of re-election, hidden behind the pretence of democracy, were each time met with protests yet never any serious violence. He had kept a lid on things in his country and aimed to remain in power until the end of his days. Before the rise of Putin (the first time around), Lukashenko had dreamed the Belarus would be reunited with Russia: it would be a union which he would be in power of too. Putin’s return to the presidency had initially been welcomed by Lukashenko because he had had a terrible relationship with Medvedev and watched as violence hit Russia. A spill-over into Belarus was something he was concerned with. Putin put an end to the chaos of Medvedev’s rule – Lukashenko wasn’t an idiot and thus didn’t believe the lies for a second – and private congratulations had been sent from Minsk to Moscow for ‘restoring order’. The terse reply had come from Putin. Lukashenko, while offended at the coldness of Putin, had consoled himself that at least that meant things were back to normal there then! But he soon realised that things hadn’t returned to normal.

Russia was on a collision course with the West. The state of international tensions was a road to war which Lukashenko saw as occurring at this current time. Putin might not have agreed that conflict was looking almost certain now but his counterpart in Minsk was certain that it was. That Russian-NATO fight which Belarus’ president believed would break out was one which was going to drag Belarus in. Avoiding it appeared impossible. Lukashenko saw no way which his county could stay out. This was confirmed when NATO started moving military forces – small ones admittedly – into Poland and the Baltic States. The geography of the region meant that their deployments were going to bring about a situation in wartime where Belarus would become a battlefield because those would be joined by more... to say nothing of what Russian military forces would be inserted into the region. His country had to be the scene of fighting: it would be impossible for Belarus to not play a role. Even more than Putin did, Lukashenko was certain that the West, while not being responsible for Medvedev’s death, was looking for a conflict with Russia now that their games to get Medvedev to do what they wanted or for Russia to descend into anarchy had fallen apart. They would also like to see Belarus fall to a colour revolution and then move in troops to ‘secure the peace’. Russia was Belarus’ natural partner and if the West couldn’t have the nation fall apart internally, then when it eventually did what it did in military terms, they would attack Russia through Belarus. Joint military-exercises – live ones and staff planning – all foresaw the character of such an attack as going through Belarus. Such an attack would be opposed. Belarus didn’t have the military might that Russia had yet it wasn’t impotent either. More cooperation was sought with Russia to defend both countries in wartime because staying out of the brewing conflict was impossible. Putin still believed that NATO could be deterred, yet Lukashenko was certain that 2010 would be the time that they would try.

Before the spectacular fall-out between Russia and the West, Lukashenko’s regime had long been involved in disputes with the West separate from those. The busy-bodies there went on and on about ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’. They didn’t understand the character of his nation nor his people, Lukashenko told anyone who would listen, and instead only wanted to see his regime broken just for the sake of it. Like post-Soviet Russia and elsewhere within the former USSR had been raped by Western capitalists, using the slogans of human rights and democracy to advance their aims, Lukashenko knew that if the West got their wish and deposed him, the same would be done to Belarus what had been done elsewhere. For more than a decade, he had stood strong against efforts to rape Belarus. If that should mean that protesters died and the West had its criticisms, then so be it. As was the case every March 25th, protesters came out to illegally celebrate what the opposition considered the country’s independence day. And as was done each time, the regime sought to break-up those celebrations which were really all about protesting against Lukashenko’s regime rather than Belarus’ foundation. This year’s clash was different than those in the past though with an outrageous reaction from the authorities personally ordered. Putin had sent Kozak to Minsk and the Russian foreign minister told his host that the West was helping to organise this (there was intelligence that Moscow had) and that they would be looking for signs of weakness in the regime. Lukashenko assured him that there would be none. In addition to that outward element to how Belarus reacted to the protesters, Lukashenko had been stung since the New Year by a different kind of personal criticism against him than had come before from his detractors. He had been mocked. The reports had come to him of what was being said (he always wanted to hear every insult and accusation) and it was worse than previously seen. His appearance and his character were the subject of cutting ridicule. In the darkest of irony, he was even compared unfavourably as a dictator to the one which Putin was by his opponents: the man in the Kremlin was more competent at the business of repression. Lukashenko didn’t take any of this well. Mockery was something which stung him more than anything else. Ahead of the incoming & regular protests, Lukashenko had aimed to distract his people. There had been announcements made of detentions of certain officials accused of corruption (the targets being small fry and those Lukashenko was willing to sacrifice) and also official denouncements of ‘Germans in Lithuania’. The latter concerned the NATO-organised Baltic Brigade which had recently been deployed into the Baltic States. There Germans who were part of it were actually in Latvia, not the far-closer Lithuania, but Minsk declared that they were in Lithuania and reminded the Belorussian people of the last time that German soldiers had been so close to the nation. Lukashenko was hoping these distractions would lessen the numbers of protesters against the regime, but against those who did turn out, he would throw everything he had at them and emulate Putin by putting an end to the attempt at bringing anarchy to his country before it started.

It was a bloody massacre. Not just in Minsk, but in other Belorussian cities. Hundreds were killed when Lukashenko ordered his security forces to open fire with live ammunition on the crowds of protesters. No warning shots were given and the masses of civilians were mowed down with machine gun fire. March 25th 2010 would go down in the history books for the utter horror it was. There were at least a thousand more left injured too, those wounded by bullets or by the crush of the crowds as they ran from the gunfire. Hospitals closed their doors to those injured and this was enforced by direct presidential orders. Strength and determination to not be brought down was the image which Lukashenko aimed to project with these actions. He had outdone Putin indeed. While foreign journalists faced major restrictions entering and then operating inside Belarus, images and eyewitness accounts from the massacres got out. Lukashenko gave the order for this not to be stopped this time. His aim was to show the world that Belarus wouldn’t stand for Western interference backed by traitorous proxies. The world got another message instead: the regime in Belarus was just as bad as Russia’s was.


The late March massacres across Belarus came at a time when there were ‘interesting’ developments in another part of Eastern Europe: Poland. Since the Russo-Georgian War back in the summer of 2008, Poland had been at the forefront of urging its NATO’s partners to take the threat from Russia seriously. Poland felt directly threatened by possible Russian military action just as the Baltic States did too. There had been an agreement signed with the Bush Administration for Poland to host part of a defensive missile shield yet the Obama Administration – while not officially cancelling that – wasn’t keen on the idea at all. Disappointed, the Polish government had moved onwards. Warsaw had pushed hard for NATO unity and been at the forefront of calling for sanctions on Russia and withdrawing diplomats. Moreover, Poland wanted NATO military forces on its soil as well as supporting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in seeing other troops from the Alliance sent to them too. This came from Warsaw where there had been unity among Poland’s leaders on the matter with the president (the head of state), the prime minister (head of government) and the Sejm (the parliament) all united on the matter. Prime Minister Tusk had worked with both NATO and the EU to achieve the united approach outside of Poland as well. There was only harmony in Warsaw on the face of it though. Not all of the parliament was as committed to taking what some regarded as rather a bellicose approach to Russia due to the consequences of what they saw as the natural end of that… Russian troops ending up marching across Poland and bombs falling on the nation even if the Russians were later repulsed by Poland’s allies. Those who feared that this was the course being taken later found themselves an ally in President Lech Kaczyński.

Kaczyński was looking for a means to defuse Russian-NATO tensions as he saw it all getting out of hand. He wasn’t alone in this with other heads of state & government, senior politicians and diplomats from across the world were all doing the same. The desire on his part to do this came to the attention of the Kremlin. Putin was willing to see where such a thing might go. On one hand, weakening the joint resolve of NATO was an objective though there was still also a wish to not bring about a conflict if that could be done. Last year, during diplomatic contacts between Moscow and Warsaw ahead of the complete break eventually made, Medvedev and Kaczyński had discussed a joint commemoration ceremony of the 1940 mass slaughter of Poles by the Soviet NKVD at Katyn. Russia’s then president had extended an invitation to Kaczyński to come to Russia where, seventy years after the event, the two countries could come together to remember the dead. Months previous to the war in Georgia which started all of this mess, Putin himself had called Katyn a political crime and reassured the Poles that the position of the Russian Federation that it was the work of the then USSR, not the Nazis as such a lie had so long been. Katyn was something not effected by the charges of historical revisionism defaming the Russian people recently brought across Russia. There was therefore still the possibility that the Poles could come to Katyn in April 2010. Putin sent Kaczyński a personal invitation to attend the commemorations which he told Poland were still going to go ahead despite international tensions. Kaczyński went to Katyn… and to his doom.

If a fiction writer had wrote the sequence of events aboard the aircraft taking the President of Poland to the Katyn ceremony, it would be laughed at for being absurd. The writing of a hack indeed! What occurred was just that unbelievable. The aircraft was a Soviet-built Tupolev-154, a triple-engine passenger jet in the colours of the Polish Air Force and one of two identical ones used for VIP tasks. It was well-maintained and flown by an experienced crew. Aboard along with Kaczyński were many notables from Poland as well as almost the entirety of the nation’s military high command too. They took off from Warsaw in the morning, went above Belarus and flew into bad weather near the airport at Smolensk which was their destination. Kaczyński was known as a difficult passenger for the VIP flight crews of the pair of Tu-154 aircraft. There had been issues with him before on other flights elsewhere during his presidency. He had no time for delays and difficulties: careers of air crews had been ruined after not doing what he wanted of them. Approaching Smolensk, the fog on the ground was reported to be worse than feared. There was little automated navigation equipment for foreign aircraft as standard elsewhere at Smolensk. No Russian-speaking ‘leaderman’ aboard (think a pilot in shipping terms for approaching foreign ports) and the pilot had to talk to the tower at Smolensk while approaching as well as flying. Recommendations were made that the Tu-154 divert elsewhere, perhaps to Moscow. The chief of the Polish Air Force and the presidential protocol officer both came onto the flight deck as the Tu-154 circled ahead of landing. Disputes took place and in the face of this, plus the demands coming from the passenger cabin from Kaczyński, the pilot took the decision to make an attempt to land. He would fly through the fog and see if he would put their Tu-154 down. Anyone sensible would have diverted to another landing site. The aircraft was put down, down indeed. It crashed short of the runway after hitting tress hidden by fog. There was an explosion and a great fireball erupted. All ninety-four people aboard were killed instantly including Kaczyński. It was all an avoidable accident.

Claims would come afterwards that there had been a bomb aboard as part of a conspiracy to kill Poland’s head of state or maybe one of the other important people aboard. Another claim would be that the Russians had shot the aircraft down. The conspiracy theories went onwards ranging from this being that Americans had caused the crash to keep NATO unity in the face of Kaczyński putting that in danger to the Russians spoofing the aircraft into its impact with the ground to cause heartache for the Polish people to aliens to the illuminati and so on. For it all to be an accident, for the crash to be human error along with human weakness… well that wasn’t what people wanted to believe. There just had to be something more to the crash of the Tu-154 than an accident. Across Poland, there was an immediate belief that the death of Kaczyński was an act of murder. The wildest conspiracy theories were seen as just that yet there was a belief that Russia had done this. Why? That was unknown. This belief was only reinforced by the official Russian attitude post-crash, one emboldened by how Poland responded in kind. Russia wouldn’t allow access to the crash site. The Poles demanded that their investigators go to the crash site. What was needed was someone to step in, an honest broker to mediate between the two nations where tensions were extremely high and thus calm things down. The dead Kaczyński would have been that honest broker. The dispute between Putin and Tusk on this was extremely heated and, despite the shouts from Tusk, he and his country got nowhere. Poland, and increasingly more and more of its allies, became convinced by the behaviour of the Kremlin that Russia was responsible though at a loss to explain their thinking on this.

As said, the crash was an accident. What happened on the ground afterwards with the belongings of some of the passengers wasn’t accidental. Personnel from the Ministry of Emergency Situations were all over the crash scene where they removed bodies but alongside them were GRU intelligence officers. The Tu-154 had been carrying a who’s-who of Poland’s top military commanders: the chief of the general staff, the three service chiefs and the head of the country’s special forces along with aides for such men. The electronic devices of such people were removed, even when smashed to pieces. Such items contained information which, with patience, could be recovered from within them. This was done. NATO could change access codes and things like that yet all of this stale information was there to be pieced together. The GRU found many interesting things which were both Poland-specific and also concerning NATO. The NATO information covered matters such as recent coordination of NATO activities in Poland to support US forces there plus the military units deployed into the Baltic States. There was recent NATO intelligence on Russian deployments of Iskander ballistic missiles into Kaliningrad too. Finally, among everything else, the GRU found mention of a NATO war plan named ‘Eagle Guardian’. There were no details, none at all: just several mentions in recovered memos of this war plan. The GRU was frustrated in discovering any more from the Smolensk crash site about this. From what they could deduce, it might be NATO’s rumoured new defence for Eastern Europe or even an attack plan into Russia and Belarus. Not knowing was infuriating. They’d look elsewhere but then the SVR was too and their rival intelligence agency would love to beat them to the punch on that.



(The OTL air crash in Smolensk happened just as described)
(The issue of Russian military intelligence officers and electronic devices was something I read here: web.archive.org/web/20100516032555/http:/www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/13/inside-the-ring-86422687    )

Fantastic update!

Hope it is fixed now: Why were Russian “Black Ops” Spetsnaz, Special-Forces units, at the crash site of the Polish President’s plane, on April 10, 2010, in Smolensk, Russia?