Eagle Guardian STORY ONLY thread[{locked}]

Three

McCain had chosen Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate for the presidency. That pick was quite a surprise and rapidly very controversial. Palin was a character indeed. She only had to open her mouth and all sorts of drama followed. Speaking in Tallahassee during a campaign stop through Florida and the Deep South, Palin commented on the deaths in Moscow the morning after the bloody end to the protests there. As was the case with many things she spoke of during her time running for the vice presidency, Palin provided red meat for the base and fodder for the critics.

“There’re killing people on the streets of Moscow and… erm… you know… someone should see to it that it is stopped.”

The latter part of such a statement was something taken rather a lot out of context later. Palin wasn’t calling for the United States to stop protesters from dying in Russia’s capital. She certainly wasn’t stating that a McCain-Palin – stressing on the second name there in some sort of joint presidency – Administration would do anything to have that stopped. No, it wasn’t a case of anything like that. She just responded to a reporter’s question with the first thing that popped into her head. The campaign with her on the ticket was already all over the place. McCain had temporarily suspended his campaigning (Palin hadn’t) last month to return to the Senate to take part in organising the multi-billion dollar bail-out for Wall Street as the financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers got far, far worse. The momentum in the race for the presidency was with Obama. Palin would say many other things in the weeks following what she said in Tallahassee and was said to be ‘going rogue’ with how she campaigned: most certainly not on script as she was supposed to be.

The furore around the phase ‘someone should see to it that it is stopped’ would be in the main forgotten by Palin’s domestic audience but it was something remembered in Moscow. They didn’t like it at all. The suggestion made in elements of the American media that Palin was saying that the United States should act to enforce its values on Russia was taken to heart in the Kremlin. All expectation was the Obama-Biden would beat McCain-Palin, which, of course, turned out to be wholly correct, but those words just wouldn’t be forgotten about. Here was the United States once again acting with supreme arrogance when it came to internal Russian matters.


In the grand scheme of things, Palin’s remarks meant nothing though. She was a vice presidential candidate for a campaign soon to go down in flames. The Kremlin was elsewhere engaged in a war of words with those in the United States who did matter: that being the Bush Administration. Bush and Rice both made official public statements following the protests in Moscow and the deaths there which carried more weight. The criticism was more precise and phrased better in diplomatic terms.

Moscow reacted with anger here too. Their own foreign minister, ambassador to the United States and UN ambassador all criticised American ‘interference’ into internal domestic affairs of Russia. The existing sanctions were once again denounced too. One of the talking heads on Russia Today then referred to Bush as “nothing but a dead man walking”. Like Palin’s remark, there was a context missed here. There was also a translation issue. Moreover, this political commentator sitting in a studio in Moscow wasn’t an official voice of the Russian Government. When he said such a thing, he meant this in a political fashion. Bush was practically a lame-duck now with the election less than a month away and his term of office ending in January. Follow up remarks about dealing with either McCain or Obama – the commentator was hedging his bets – gave the context to that phrase.

As can be imagined, when replayed for American audiences in the US media, Bush being deemed as ‘a dead man walking’ didn’t go down well. It was treated as some sort of threat in some quarters but elsewhere as a direct disrespect to the Office of the Presidency. Bush’s opponents and fiercest critics reacted harshly to such a remark. Obama called it ‘outrageous’; liberal media outlets chose this as a time to stand by their president in the face of such open hostility from abroad. However, this came at the same time though as an election was ongoing nationwide and there were already other moves being made related to the ongoing situation with US-Russia relations. There was a strategy within the Democratic presidential campaign staff to tie McCain to Bush when it came to extending the president’s unpopularity to the Republican presidential contender. Support for the Office of the Presidency didn’t come from such behind-the-scenes figures who were playing dirty. Someone senior in the Obama campaign camp got their hands on a transcript of a recording made in the White House’s Situation Room back in early August. It would be a federal crime to have possession of such a thing and no one wanted to be caught red-handed when exposing the contents. It was handed off to an outside party, entirely separate from Obama’s campaign. He himself knew nothing of the whole matter.

The Roki Tunnel Memo was leaked on the internet yet soon picked up on the major news networks. It covered speculative talk during the Russo-Georgian War about how if, only if, American military force was to be used to aid Georgia during that conflict, that could be thus done. Bombing the aforementioned transport link under the Caucasus Mountains was one of those and the part which was discussed more than anything else, especially as it was suggested that it could be done by American stealth aircraft and then denied as something conducted by the United States in the manner of a plausible deniability. The Bush Administration hadn’t moved to the planning stage nor started making any preparations to do this. It was just one of many options put on the table. The intention behind the leak was all about sabotaging McCain by suggesting that electing him would see the American public vote for ‘four more years of Bush’s militaristic interventionism’. That didn’t work. The Roki Tunnel Memo had no real effect with regards to the political situation in the United States. Its leakers were actively sought by the FBI while both the McCain & Obama campaigns (each with their own reasons) sought to have attention focused elsewhere due to it helping neither once it played out like it did.

The intelligence value of this leaked documentation was something of great use for Russia’s intelligence agencies as it was posted on the internet completely unsanitised. All those letters and numbers which looked random to the human eye and the codewords that were too all included were of interest to organisations such as the GRU and the SVR. Its leakers thought nothing of such a thing as they had their own motives as their sole thinking. That issue aside, the clear evidence that there was that the United States had been plotting such a thing as bombing the Roki Tunnel when used by Russian forces and denying that when done went down as could be expected in the Kremlin. Palin’s remarks in Tallahassee were nothing in comparison to the contents of this leak. Here was confirmation of the hostile intent and the duplicity of the United States for them to see. There was no need for paranoia: here was the evidence.





Four

Russia had won its war against the small nation of Georgia earlier in the year, and had done so totally and overwhelmingly. Much of Georgia remained a Russian ‘security zone’, in Moscow’s words, and Russian soldiers were enforcing order in those regions. Much military equipment had been captured from Georgia, and bases had been destroyed after being captured as opposed to being handed back over to the Georgians. Major improvements had been made to the quality of forces in the Volga-Ural Military District since the bloody urban fighting in the renegade province of Chechnya that had occurred sporadically throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. Nevertheless, there were some major issues with the Russian Armed Forces that had been highlighted during the war with Georgia.

Russian command, control, communications & intelligence (C3I) assets had performed exceptionally poorly during the conflict. Had the Russian high command wanted Lieutenant-General Khurylov’s advance to come to a halt short of Tbilisi, it would have been several hours, perhaps even days, before those orders could have been received. At one point, the Fifty-Eight’s Army’s command group was communicating with higher authority through a satellite phone taken from a journalist. This was a major problem to Moscow, especially in the wake of the Roki Tunnel leak.

Additionally, analysts called the lack of air support given to Russian troops nothing short of abysmal. Russia had a large and relatively competent air force, which included fourth-generation fighters and strike aircraft, but few of these warplanes had actually been deployed against Georgia during that previous August. Russian commanders on the ground had received significant air support from attack helicopters operating with Ground Forces’ units, but the Air Force had been nowhere to be seen. Again, with the information now coming to light that the Americans had been considering striking Russian forces invading Georgia, the General Staff in Moscow reluctantly admitted to both themselves and their superiors that their own fighters would have done little to interdict such an American attack, had it occurred. As well as this, it had also come to light that many of Russia’s Su-25 Frogfoot strike aircraft were lacking the correct radar and ground-targeting computers required to effectively provide close air support while minimalizing the risk of hitting friendly forces.

Russian commanders had also neglected to efficiently use the country’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) – the equivalent to GPS – for targeting Georgian forces. Due in no small part to the incompetence of Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, the drones which had become so infamous in the hands of the CIA and U.S. Military had not been properly used to detect Georgian formations either. Russia had developed precision-guided weapons in previous decades, having been shown their effectiveness during Operation Desert Storm and the NATO campaigns over Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, the failure of Russian forces to use them against even a foe as weak as Georgia was ultimately proof to the Kremlin that Russia no longer qualified as a so-called ‘peer level’ adversary to the United States and its NATO allies. In the aftermath of the Georgia War, Medvedev’s government sought to effectively resolve these issues. Russia had a large and relatively well-equipped and well-trained military. The country relied on hard power over soft power when conducting diplomacy near its borders, and Russia’s military prowess couldn’t be thrown away over negligence, incompetence, and a lack of spare parts for equipment that was otherwise fully functional.

In the aftermath of the war, Serdukov was quietly forced to resign aside the Chief of Staff of the Russian Air Force. Both men had assumed that their jobs would be safe after such a resounding victory against Georgia, but this was not to be. In recent months, Minister Serdyukov had drafted a series of major reforms to the Russian Military, scaling down the Armed Forces by a huge number and outlawing the conscription that Moscow had relied on for decades. The proposed ‘Serdyukov Reforms’ died with the Minister’s career.

This was only the first step of a major effort to resolve Russia’s military problems. Following these resignations, a series of exercises would play out across western and southern areas of Russia. A total of fifty-seven generals & colonels were dismissed for incompetence, and seventeen other officers were arrested on charges of corruption. The Moscow, Leningrad, and Volga-Urals Military Districts engaged in a trio of exercises.

In direct violation of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, these exercises involved more than 170,000 troops across the three military districts. They focused not only on rapid mobilisation and deployment of troops, but also on practicing close air support, air defence, communications, and intelligence gathering. Drones and satellites were used to locate and identify hypothetical targets, which were then pounced upon by strike fighters and artillery. That was one thing Russia had never trailed behind the west in. Artillery had always been a cornerstone of Russian doctrine, and in the exercises which rocked the Russian countryside in the winter of 2008 it was demonstrably effective. Hundreds of rockets from MLRS systems as well as 152mm rounds from massive mobile howitzers slammed into mock targets, before air assault troops would move in, riding aboard swarms of Mi-17 and Mi-24 gunships and covered by Frogfoot and Flanker aircraft. Tanks and armoured vehicles would then smash through enemy opposition as the helicopters dropped men behind the lines. Then would come the second echelon of armoured, mechanised and airborne troops, charging in to exploit the breakthroughs.

There were, of course, major flaws in the Russian Military at the time. It had taken days longer than expected to mobilise the troops to carry out operations. Some units were missing significant amounts of personal equipment; not so much tanks and artillery, but rather small pieces like gas mask filters, radio batteries, or even ammunition. It would take time for these issues to be fixed, but Moscow was determined to properly equip its troops. These winter exercises fully exposed the flaws that had been highlighted in Georgia. Nevertheless, the performance of Russian troops during the later phase of operations could have been described as “good, but could be better.”

During the second week of operations, the exercises escalated further; men from the VDV’s 98th Guards Airborne Division practised a division-sized parachute assault to ‘capture’ a pair of airfields outside St. Petersburg. The paratroopers landed mostly on target, though some men did end up falling short of the mark due to both their own mistakes and pilot error. A trio of Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bombers as well as a full squadron of Tu-22M Backfire aircraft practised a large-scale missile strike on naval vessels in the Baltic Sea, along with airfields in Denmark, Sweden, and southern Norway. This was mirrored further south, with a similar mock bombing-run launched against airfields in Romania and Bulgaria. GLONASS was used effectively to target these facilities in stark contrast to its use in the Georgia War. The exercise ultimately concluded with a simulated launch of several Iskander missiles with tactical nuclear warheads; for the purpose of the exercise, the targets struck included an American aircraft carrier strike group, the U.S. Air Force Bases at Spangdahlem & Ramstein in Germany, and several civilian airports in Poland and Romania.

Not that NATO or its European partners would be informed of this fact, but these exercises were based around a very specific scenario.

In an effort to answer the question ‘what if the U.S. had directly intervened in the Georgia War?’ Moscow sought to construct a similar scenario for its ongoing exercises. A fictional country was ‘invaded’ in act of self-defence, just as the Kremlin saw the invasion of Georgia, and then there was a hypothetical American and British intervention when their warplanes started bombing Russian transportation links and launching cruise missiles from submarines. Staff officers plotted a rapid escalation into all-out war between NATO and Russia. It all made sense, strategically & operationally, in Moscow; airstrikes against NATO-designated airfields in Scandinavia and southern Europe which could have been used for operations against Russia in that nightmare scenario; a cruise missile attack against a simulated carrier battle group in the Baltic Sea; a division-sized airdrop to capture potential U.S. staging areas for troops going to fight the Russians in Georgia.

Moscow had previously judged the likelihood of U.S. intervention in the Georgian War as minimal. Sure enough, the Russian Armed Forces were not what they were in 1983, but, unlike Iraq, even in 2008 they could give the Americans not just a bloody nose, but a black eye and a few cracked ribs too! That was without mentioning Russia’s extremely large nuclear arsenal, which could, should the need arise, turn the United States into a radioactive ruin at the turn of a key. This was until the leaked memo that came from the White House surrounding American planning for operations in Georgia. Even though it had been discussed, there was never a real possibility of the U.S. giving direct military aid to Georgia. To the Kremlin, though, the leaked comments sounded very different. The idea of American intervention in future regional wars against non-NATO, non-EU affiliated countries – perhaps in Central Asia, for example – was now a very real threat that had to be addressed.

America was focused on its economic problems and on the recent election. There was concern in European capitals though. Tallinn, Riga & Vilnius were horrified. Though there had been concern in the capitals of NATO’s easternmost members during the Georgia War, none of the three country’s had expected such a sudden and large-scale series of exercises to take place near their own borders; the dropping of a whole airborne division near St. Petersburg could have just as easily been to the west of the Russia-Estonia border. In Stockholm, the exercises made Moscow even more unpopular. Sweden was not even a NATO country, and yet Russia had practised bombarding her capital city with cruise missiles. There was little that could be done though. Russia would never act militarily against NATO, or so the Baltic States were informed by the rest of the Alliance.

Seven

Through the very end of November and all throughout December, condemnation came from across the world aimed at Russia’s bloody internal crackdown on the streets of its cities. This didn’t die down. Medvedev and Putin had anticipated a strong reaction – it was worse than what they had feared too – but the belief was that soon enough, other events would draw attention away. That just didn’t happen. The visibility of what had happened made this an issue which wouldn’t just be forgotten about across the globe. Statements by political figures, comments by international campaigners, and debates in national parliaments & international bodies went on and on.

‘11-26’ was a defining moment in so many ways for how much of the world would view Russia afterwards.

There were a few countries whose leader expressed support for the actions taken by the Kremlin and there were those who chose not to condemn Russia too. Certain individuals took their moment to try to muddle the waters as well and claim that there was more context to what had happened. However, these were few and far between. Venezuela’s dictator could say all that it wanted in support of the massacres, China’s regime could make no comment apart from stating that this was a concern for Russia only and Italy’s foreign minister could claim that maybe ‘both sides’ were to blame yet these were voices in the wind. There was a bandwagon to jump on for many. Those who really didn’t give a damn about innocent Russian civilians being beaten or shot to death were given an opportunity to join in. Russia was a punchbag at the minute, a convenient one too.

Alongside all of the statements – political and diplomatic – which came from so many corners there were those which started to take action. The sanctions levelled on Russia following the war with Georgia last year, and the subsequent revelations of that shooting of prisoners plus the failure to withdraw fully from that nation, had never been enough for many. They had been deemed ‘pointless’ at the time in many quarters. Those first sanctions had only partially targeted Russia’s international trade links with the outside world and came with countless caveats which meant that away from the strong words by politicians, they really were pointless in having any effect upon leadership in the Kremlin. The Russian Government was never going to change its behaviour following those. Following 11-26, there were calls made for ‘real’ sanctions this time. If other countries had to take some financial pain, even at this time of great international financial uncertainty, then so be it. It was argued the perceived weakness shown months beforehand had only emboldened Russia and given rise to what it eventually did. True or not, that became the consensus. Many governments, working together, sought to draw up new sanctions. There were still efforts to protect themselves though and this drew things out into the beginning of 2009.


Obama was inaugurated and took office on January 20th. ‘Hope’ and ‘Yes we can’ had won last November. Now that message of change by the pop star who was the new president was inside the White House. There were high hopes for all that the forty-fourth President of the United States could do. The majority of his election campaign had focused on domestic issues – naturally – yet occupying the position vacated by the outgoing Bush meant that foreign affairs were going to be a major part of his presidency. No president could avoid that, not with America in many ways seeing itself (and others agreeing with that) as the leader of the Free World.

Russia was certainly not part of the Free World. It hadn’t been before the Russo-Georgia War nor the killings of so many innocents on the streets of its cities on 11-26. It certainly wasn’t going to be after those massacres which all the world had seen. Had Obama wanted to – which he didn’t anyway – he would have found it impossible to try to ignore the international push for action against Russia in response. Rather than follow, Obama set to lead it. Sarkozy in Paris and Brown in London both had been in contact with the new president since he was elected. All during the transition, where he remained president-elect and thus with no official power, the issue had been there. Bush hadn’t been able to turn the international feeling for something to be done into real action yet Obama was going to.

The defeated challenger to Obama in the Democratic party primaries, Hilary Clinton, took office as Secretary of State the day after her victorious rival’s inauguration. Confirmation hearings had started early and behind the scenes manoeuvring had been done to assure that the former First Lady was quickly in office at the State Department. Instead of Obama directly, it was quickly her who attracted the ire of the Kremlin… very much so in the same vein as her predecessor Condi Rice had too which was quite something as both were very different characters. Clinton promised a ‘reset’ with Russia. Obama wanted a complete change in US-Russia ties in response to what had occurred on 11-26. The president considered the Bush had twiddled his thumbs too much in acting and that wouldn’t be the same with his administration. Clinton set about following the agenda which Obama wanted following when it came to Russia, one which had considerable bi-partisan support in Washington as well.

The United States took the global lead in punishing the Kremlin for what it had done. The actions taken were meant to force the Russian leadership to change course in its behaviour or suffer the consequences of the ire it had raised through the West. Russia would be hit where it would hurt – in the pocket – and the weapon employed would be oil.


Global oil prices had come down during the preceding Autumn. Turmoil on the international money markets had been the main cause of this. Speculation from those in the know in the business was that they would rise again through early 2009. Prices went up and down: that was the natural order of things. Oil exports came from all over the globe and mainly went to the energy-hungry West. China was a new buyer in the market and the West’s share was decreasing due to that yet still dominant overall. Oil prices were manipulated as the key element of the West’s weaponization of oil against the Kremlin. Working with Middle Eastern oil producers – who were getting something out of this soon enough – the price from much of the Arab world for their oil exports was going to stay low. A lack of any sign of American nor European tension with Iran, as previously thought likely, aided this effort.

Russia’s prices were higher. They hadn’t come down late in 2008 and there was no intention to lower them in 2009 either. Customers for Russian oil were mainly in Europe and it was always convenient for them to buy from Russia despite all of the negative issues surrounding transporting that oil – plus natural gas too; Western Europe was near-addicted to that other hydrocarbon – through Eastern Europe. Fast getting win of what was going on where the West had acted in concert with much of the Middle East, the Kremlin sought to play the game back on them. Both Libya and Venezuela had expressed solidarity with Moscow in the face of recent Western hostility and each was a major oil exporter. The Kremlin turned on the charm to get them both to stick with the Moscow approach of standing firm in keeping prices higher than elsewhere. The West would blink in the end and buy from them too as the international oil markets were full of ups and downs. Tripoli was more keen on this than Caracas but both Gaddafi and Chavez were willing to follow this course of action. Sticking a finger in the eye of Washington was what the former wanted; the latter would be getting something more meaningful.

Furthermore, where the West had acted behind the scenes with their plan to use the price of oil as a weapon against Russia, they had acted openly in a whole range of economic and trade sanctions as well. These were a big deal and the face of the ‘reset’ which was spearheaded by Washington. However, from the Kremlin there came a response here too. Medvedev and Putin (the latter especially) weren’t going to accept all which was being done with those sanctions that the Obama Administration made a big deal out of alongside Paris and London. They applied their own and targeted Western businesses which did business with Russia. Lobbying efforts had been made by corporations based in the West who had a global reach to limit some of what had been done with those sanctions against Russia. This had come with varying degrees of success for them. Moscow’s response was to target those corporations directly and let their boards & shareholders put the pressure on Western governments – to make it their problem – at a time when the West was entering a recession. Deals were blocked and there came nationalisation of certain assets. Some big joint oil projects between American oil companies and Russia were hit as well as a BP project in the Russian Far East.

Then there was Nord Stream.

This was a highly-contentious multi-national project to lay a pipeline under the Baltic Sea to send gas direct to Germany from Russia. Work was due to start next year on laying that pipeline – which would bypass Eastern Europe – and the first deliveries were due to start in late 2010. Cancelling Nord Stream would cost Russia too much as a nation and hit the bank accounts of many oligarchs… one of those rumoured to be Putin himself. However, delays were imposed and these were of a bureaucratic nature and not very well disguised for the punitive form that they were. The intention behind this was to cause political and economic consequences in Western Europe, in Germany especially. Berlin had been publicly on the same page as Washington, Paris and London when it came to sanctions against Russia but that wasn’t the case behind the scenes. Nord Stream mattered to Germany as much as it mattered to Russia.

The Kremlin waited for the response, confident that Germany’s economic concerns would pull the rug out from under the whole European position of siding with the Americans in this dispute.





Eight

Albania and Croatia were soon to become NATO’s newest members, much to Moscow’s horror. Both countries had a long and somewhat complicated history with the western alliance that had lasted throughout the Cold War and the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. Albania’s relationship with NATO had been the lesser troubled one of the two, and the Balkan country had joined NATO’s partnership for peace in 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This had, in effect, kick-started Albania’s path to eventually joining NATO. As one of the first eastern European countries to join the partnership for peace programme, Albania was generally a well-received country with a positive relationship with NATO through the 1990s and early 2000s. Albanian politicians considered membership to NATO as a top priority and as a largely bipartisan issue. Croatia had a somewhat less encouraging history with the alliance due to the hugely destructive, multi-sided civil war in Bosnia that had lasted throughout the 90s, involving Croats, Muslims & Serbs all fighting each other. Nevertheless, Croatia had joined the partnership for peace at the turn of the century, joining Albania and several other countries as effective NATO allies without membership. Since 2002, Croatia had contributed soldiers to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.

Both Albania and Croatia had been on track for NATO membership for several years by the time the alliance fully accepted their memberships on April 1st, 2009. Representatives of both countries had been formally invited to join the NATO alliance at the Bucharest Summit the previous year, and much of what followed was pure formalities. Their ambassadors filed the ‘instruments of accession’ as a final formality at a ceremony in Washington D.C., bringing Albania and Croatia into NATO in the same week as the alliance’s 60th anniversary. Though both of NATO’s newest members had relatively small armed forces, their acceptance as NATO allies was hugely symbolic, given that the region had been in the midst of a horrific civil war only a decade prior. Both countries were welcomed at NATO’s 60th Anniversary Summit in Strasbourg, France, and Kehl, Germany.

High on the list of issues to be addressed at the summit was the apparent resurgence of Russia as a major world power hostile to the west. Following the Georgia War and President Medvedev’s ruthless crackdown on protestors, representatives from Eastern Europe tried to draw attention to Moscow’s aggressive behaviour and its newfound sense of confidence. Ultimately, though, Russia’s actions drew little military concern outside of the Baltic States and Poland, apart from the musings of a few NATO officers who attended the summit. Amongst them was Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Shirreff, who commanded NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (AARC). Shirreff, amongst a few others, insisted that Russia needed to be contained and that the successes in Georgia and recent improvements in Russia’s military posture could lead to trouble in NATO’s vulnerable, isolated eastern flank. General Sir Shirreff and his companions weren’t able to publicly air their concerns beyond quite, unofficial conversations with other NATO officials, both military and civilian, though.

Brussels kept insisting that Russia was focusing on its own internal strife and couldn’t possibly hope to try to expand westwards.

In Moscow, there was outrage at the ascension of Croatia and Albania to NATO member status. Though it had been public knowledge since the Bucharest Summit last year (and the SVR had known long before then) that the two countries were being invited to join NATO as official member states, President Medvedev – urged by his military Chiefs of Staff and by Prime Minister Putin – needed to react publicly and condemn this event. Serbia, a long-term Russian ally in Europe, was now bordered by yet more NATO countries and was now totally surrounded by the alliance. Moscow had been displeased at NATO’s intervention in the Balkans in 1999, and the idea of a repeat of Operation ALLIED FORCE kept planners awake at night at the Russian Defence Ministry. Though NATO was already at her borders, Russia still frowned at the thought of further nations joining the alliance. Moscow saw it as a direct violation of various agreements made in the 1990s, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

In looking towards North Africa and the Middle East, Moscow found the perfect way to hit back against what it saw as western encroachment on its sphere of influence.



Muammar Gaddafi had become the de facto head of state of Libya in 1969, after leading a coup d’état against King Idris I. Since then, Gaddafi had ruled Libya as any other dictator ruled over his land; with an iron fist. More concerning to the west was Libya’s ongoing sponsorship of anti-western terrorist groups around the world. The United States had carried out numerous military strikes against targets across Libya in response to various terrorist incidents backed, funded, and sometimes even carried out by, Libyan intelligence. One of the worst of such atrocities was the Lockerbie Bombing of 1988, in which 270 people were killed when a Pan-Am airliner was blown up by individuals affiliated with Libyan intelligence, as the jet passed over Scotland. The United States had only reopened its embassy in Libya in 2006, after nearly three decades of refusing to have diplomatic relations with the terrorist state.

Libya’s armed forces were in dire need of a major refit. The Libyan Air Force operated ancient MiG-21s & MiG-23s, of which only a few dozen were actually capable of flight after years of neglect and disrepair, while the Libyan Army also desperately needed to replace its ancient T-55 & T-62 tanks. Competence amongst military personnel, from conscripts to generals, was also severely lacking due to poor training and corruption. There had been talks of a major arms deal between Russia and Libya for some years now, but nothing had come of these discussions until Albania and Croatia were allowed to join NATO. Moscow saw it as a hit-back against western interests in the region, and anything that could potentially make the United States bleed in another one of its ‘imperialist’ – in the words of RIA Novosti and such – wars in the Middle East was a good thing.

Soon, Libya acquired twenty Sukhoi-30 fighter jets. These were some of the best aircraft in the Russian inventory, armed with ultramodern sensors, radar systems and missiles, and could prove formidable in the hands of a good pilot. Similarly, Russia moved to sell seventy-five T-90MS main battle tanks, almost as good as the American M1A2 systems, to Gaddafi’s Libya. Cargo ships from Russian ports soon began arriving at Tripoli and disembarking such equipment. Most concerningly to outside intelligence sources was the shipment of a pair of S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile systems to Libya. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, had uncovered this particular aspect of the deal from sources in the Libyan military. For several years now, Libya had posed little military threat to the west, with its armed forces trailing far behind even the Iraqi Army of 2003.

Now, though, with new equipment and a number of Russian ‘advisors’ operating within the country, Libya’s military looked like it could pose a threat to somebody once again. Egypt and particularly Tunisia voiced their concerns, and the U.S. was deeply displeased with Moscow’s actions. Some hawks in Congress even suggested intercepting ships travelling from Russia to Syria and boarding them to confiscate any weapons systems, but this was not seen as a viable option by the Obama Administration, as it tried to hold relatively friendly relations with the Middle East and North Africa. The new Administration sought to bring an end to eight years of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s neo-conservatism, and taking military action against another Arab state – particularly one with backing from Russia – was the last thing on anybody’s mind.

Eleven

The obsession which came from the Kremlin during mid-2009 about locating evidence of the Western-backed conspiracy to bring about a colour revolution in Russia was compared by many members of the siloviki (the men of force; those within the security establishment who’d risen to power and prominence) to that of Operation RYAN conducted in the early Eighties by the KGB. These were men who knew their history. In their mind, the times may have been different but the paranoia was all the same. Under Andropov’s leadership of the then Soviet Union, there had been a hunt to find evidence of the intention of the West to launch a surprise nuclear attack: deemed RYAN at the time. Andropov had been convinced that the West was planning to do so and demanded that the KGB provide evidence of that. The situation in 2009 was that Putin believed that the West was about to deliver regime change in Russia – as they had done elsewhere in the ‘near abroad’ (former USSR states) – and demanded that that evidence then be found to support that. Other current siloviki, those younger ones whom hadn’t served within the KGB but solely in its successor organisations, saw parallels with the situation which the Bush Administration in the United States had been in during its early years where the political will stated that Iraq under Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and so America’s spies were sent to find evidence of that to please their political masters.

The opinions of these people were kept to themselves. The many siloviki enjoyed the privilege of power that they had. Rocking the boat was never a good idea: one only had to look at the bodies of those who had done such a thing beforehand. Alexander Litvinenko was one of those and see what had happened to him? Moreover, that view that it was all paranoia reminiscent of the Eighties was a minority opinion within the ranks of the all-prevalent siloviki. Information was coming to light that Putin was right and this only confirmed the views that many had that once again, the Rodina was targeted by foreign conspiracies. The evidence of this came and it was concrete.


The FSB was the largest and most-influential of the KGB successor organisations yet that didn’t mean that the others were impotent. In second place was the SVR: Russia’s foreign intelligence arm. It was they who sent agents all over the world on espionage and intelligence-gathering duties where they operated with non-diplomatic cover and often faced great danger. The most-recent former director of the SVR, Sergey Lebedev, a close colleague of Putin’s when the two of them served with the KGB in East Germany, had stated that ‘there has not been any place on the planet where a KGB officer has not been’. This senior figure in the siloviki made that remark when talking about the history of the former organisation which he had served in though during his tenure as SVR head (from 2000 until 2007), Lebedev had sent his officers all over the globe. His successor was Mikhail Fradkov, a former prime minister and, on the face of it, not a member of the siloviki. Fradkov was a former intelligence operative though: he just had never been properly exposed. In the tradition of the KGB, and following in the footsteps of what Lebedev had done, Fradkov sent the SVR’s intelligence operatives aboard far and wide.

One of those was a Sparrow, a ‘well-trained’ young woman, sent in April 2008 to meet with a bed-hopping congressman and gain some pillow talk from him. Representative Anthony Weiner had a steady girlfriend despite his ‘adventures’ with any woman he could convince to share his bed and she, Huma Abedin, was one of the closest aides to the then Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton. The pillow talk concerned how Abedin used her email a lot, a private set up connected to the presidential race, in conjunction with campaign work and this sparked the SVR’s interest. That interest was followed up after Clinton lost that primary campaign yet remained in the spotlight especially once Obama nominated her for that leading role in his incoming administration.

Back in early January this year, an SVR team had gone to a small town in New York state called Chappaqua. They had gained access – false identification and a lot of trickery had been employed to get past all the security – to the basement of the building which former President Bill Clinton and the then Senator Clinton had designated as their main home. They weren’t planting a bomb or plotting an assassination; such things weren’t even discussed in hypotheticals back in Moscow. Instead, they accessed the computers located in that basement as they were being set up there. A private email server – mail.clintonemail.com, operating on the Microsoft Outlook service – was run from those computers and accessed by the Clintons plus so many of their extended entourage in both official and non-official roles. There was now a tap on the communications of the incoming Secretary of State where she used this set up (and so did many of her appointed staff at the State Department) to exchange information. Everything which was sent over the server, including countless emails used the Blackberry smartphone often seen in her hands, was sent via a long and complicated chain back to the SVR.

A lot of what the SVR received at first was a load of rubbish: boring political stuff. However, there were soon secrets being sent though which the SVR had access to concerning her duties as Secretary of State. Once Putin instructed Fradkov to have the SVR find evidence of the West plotting to see regime change done in Moscow via a colour revolution, the information coming from Chappaqua become stuff of great importance.


Presented to Putin in June by Fradkov personally was a ton of ‘evidence’ that the West, but Clinton in particular, was plotting that colour revolution to depose the current Kremlin leadership. It was all there. Obama was letting her do this while he focused on his medical insurance bill going through Congress and she was working with people such as Sarkozy in Paris and Miliband in London to see this done. What Putin was told was framed in the manner which Fradkov decided that Putin wanted to hear. There was no dissenting opinion giving a different interpretation of the contents of these emails. That didn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t true: it was just a case of there being no option presented that it wasn’t all confirmed. Worse than that though, an even more dastardly scheme was being drawn up by the nefarious Clinton: she had offered the hand of friendship to Medvedev (while plotting this simultaneous colour revolution too!) behind Putin’s back and Medvedev hadn’t slapped that hand away.

Using a conduit, Clinton had offered Russia a way out of its current financial predicament and thus the resulting issues which came with that. This could be done by Medvedev ‘fully taking the reins of power for himself’. The evidence was there in those intercepted emails of this offer being recently made. The Americans were trying a carrot-and-stick approach (the carrot being the hand of friendship; the stick being supporting a revolution) when it came to their interference in internal Russian affairs. Medvedev had yet to make a response. But, and crucially but, he had said nothing about this to Putin or anyone else. Putin had put Medvedev into the position which he held. Medvedev owed him everything. They had disputed things last year concerning the ceasefire with the Russo-Georgia war which Medvedev had arranged with Sarkozy and there had come other disagreements between them when it came to dealing with the protesters on the streets of Russia’s cities… yet this was something far different from those divergencies in opinions.

Medvedev was clearly stewing over the possibility of betraying Putin. Now Putin knew all about that.


Twelve

As Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin’s duties included the signing of acts imposed by the government, and the reporting to the State Duma of government activities. However, following the end of his own first term as President of Russia, Putin had taken a much more hands-on role in the governing of the nation. He was present at virtually every one of Medvedev’s meetings with his security staff, and Putin, as a former KGB officer, would not hesitate to offer Medvedev his own personal advice. This had gone further in the wake of the Georgia War and the subsequent internal unrest that was being witnessed across Russia over the end of 2008 and sporadically throughout 2009. The crackdown and the events of 11-26 had been ordered personally by President Medvedev, but only after Putin had advised him to send in the MVD, to show the protestors that the government meant business. Putin had wanted it to be done more discretely though, with more actions taken by the Federal Security Service to prevent everything that happened from ending up on CNN. If Putin had his way, the FSB would have had foreign journalists deported and the MVD would have been given the authority to jam cell phone signals. Some had even suggested that internet access be shut off to prevent the posting of ‘anti-government propaganda’ online. None of these suggestions were heeded though, and as a result, Russia was under sanctions and isolated from much of the international community.

Medvedev could have fired Putin, in theory. It was his prerogative as the President to appoint and relieve the Prime Minister. That wasn’t possible in practice though. Everybody new that Medvedev was no more than a placeholder for Putin’s return to the presidency. In recent months, President Medvedev had tried to become more than that though. He was ultimately responsible for the decisions he made, and although he received plenty of ‘advice’ from Putin in his capacity as Prime Minister, Medvedev was beginning to act much more independently. There came further disagreements between Medvedev and Putin soon enough. When the FSB had discovered what could only be described as solid evidence of collusion between the leaders of the Autumn Movement and the Central Intelligence Agency, the Russian President was hesitant to take action. How much clearer could it be? Putin had asked his superior, after the Director of the FSB had shown the two men photographic evidence of a meeting between American intelligence officers and a leading figure in the protest movement. On the heels of this event came the revelations from the SVR that Medvedev was preparing to betray Putin. What would he do after that, the security establishment in Moscow wondered? Accede to the demands of the Autumn Movement? Resign and allow weak-willed liberals to take power? There would be an election in two years’ time, Putin new, and he would take power again. By then though it would be too late. If the unrest went on, and if Medvedev was allowed to remain in his post as President, it would only be a matter of time before United Russia was ousted from the Kremlin and its members dragged through the streets.

Prime Minister Putin had decided that Medvedev had to go. Putin was not alone in his conviction that the current President was far too weak to stop what was happening. Director of the Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov had previously been a Medvedev ally. The director of the state security apparatus had to be an ally of the political leadership. That was how things worked around the world, not just in Russia. However, since the events of 11-26, Bortnikov had become increasingly disillusioned with Medvedev’s regime. It wasn’t the loss of life that had taken place on that fateful day that had shifted Bortnikov’s support away from the President, but rather the public and visible manor in which it was done, and the subsequent increase in sanctions from the west. In addition, Medvedev’s apparent impotence when it came to taking action against hostile foreign powers who were attempting nothing less than the seizure of the Russian government drove Bortnikov into Putin’s fold.

Over the summer of 2009, both men began plotting a series of actions that could be taken against Medvedev. This was all being done to ensure the survival of the Russian State in the face of the gravest threat to the nation since 1941. At least, that was what Putin and Bortnikov told themselves and others who were brought into the plot. General Nikolai Makarov was the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. That made him the de jure head of the Russian Military. General Makarov was less politically inclined that either Putin or Bortnikov. He was a soldier through-and-through, and his ultimate duty was to the state. The state, and not any individual politician. That was how the Chief of the General Staff was sounded out and then accepted into the coup plot. He was asked whether his duty to the state and to the nation superseded his duty to any individual, and when he answered to the affirmative, Putin and Bortnikov informed him of their plans. He responded positively, announcing that he would indeed take part in the effort to subvert and if necessary remove President Medvedev from power. Finally, another military figure was brought in. Colonel-General Valery Gerasimov held something of a personal political loyalty to Putin, and in addition to that, as the head of the Moscow Military District, he had witnessed the 11-26 atrocity and had been enraged by the failure of Medvedev to keep a lid on the whole thing. Plans were drafted and re-drafted, and a variety of different options were suggested. There was talk of placing Medvedev under house arrest or forcing him to flee into exile. Blackmailing or otherwise coercing the President into resigning was also a possibility that was floated, but when it came down to it, all of these plans had flaws. Even if Medvedev could be persuaded to resign or flee the country, he would still be able to subvert the new government from abroad. General Nikolai Makarov initially wanted to have his troops seize Moscow and arrest Medvedev, but even then this would leave Medvedev alive, if imprisoned, and from there he might be able to tell the truth to the Russian people. No, it was decided; President Medvedev had to die. It was the only way of saving Russia. A plan to kill Medvedev and seize the reins of power was ordered to be put into effect.

By October 2009, Operation THUNDERBOLT was ready.


As scheduled, on the morning of October 9th, 2009, President Dmitri Medvedev boarded the presidential IL-96-300 aircraft and flew to Vladivostok International Airport. This trip was for the purpose of visiting Russian navy bases in Primorsky Krai. Really it was a photoshoot opportunity for Medvedev; the chance to look tough while standing on warships and shaking hands with the hard-charging admirals of the Russian Pacific Fleet. Serving as Medvedev’s protection on this trip was the Presidential Security Service, itself a part of the larger Federal Security Service. After landing at Vladivostok, Medvedev would have to travel by car to the city itself. The Presidential Security Service had discussed flying Medvedev there by helicopter, but that option was shut down quickly enough. A four-vehicle convoy left Vladivostok International Airport shortly after the President had landed. There were two limousines – one carrying the Russian President and one as a decoy – along with three SUV’s carrying armed bodyguards of the Federal Security Service in the convoy. There was a lot of firepower there, but it wouldn’t be enough to stop what would happen next. The convoy had been directed to take the scenic route to Vladivostok, driving through the largely desolate countryside rather than taking a more urban course.

Waiting in ambush were members of the FSB’s ruthless Spetsnaz unit known as Alpha Group.

Since its inception in the 1970s, Alpha Group had taken part in a great many operations on behalf of the FSB and its Soviet predecessor, the KGB. The unit was highly covert and little information was available about its activities. In 1979, Alpha Group members had been involved in the assassination of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin during the initial hours of the Soviet invasion of that country. Its operators had stormed Amin’s palace and mercilessly gunned him down, along with anybody else they came across. Furthermore, in the 1980s the unit had served continuously in Afghanistan throughout its occupation, and also in Beirut, where it gained a similar reputation for ruthlessness amongst Islamist terrorist groups. After the Soviet Union fell, Alpha Group operators had once again faced trial-by-fire in the ruins of Grozny and in other locations across the rebellious province of Chechnya. Today, though, members of Alpha Group were going to be conducting an entirely different operation. As Medvedev’s convoy trundled down winding country roads, THUNDERBOLT began. The SUV at the head of the convoy suddenly exploded with a colossal boom, sending flaming shards of shrapnel flying. All four agents in the car died instantly. However well-trained Medvedev’s security guards were, it still took them a couple of seconds to react to the shock of the sudden explosion. Training dictated that in the event of a vehicle ambush, one should never stop, but rather should speed up and get out of the ambush zone. The burning body of the armoured SUV blocked the road though, preventing the convoy from pushing onwards. The vehicle had been destroyed by a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile launched by an Alpha Group soldier hidden in the trees that stood beside the road. A second operator fired off another missile seconds later which obliterated the rear vehicle. Though all of the cars in the convoy were armoured and built to withstand gunfire and even grenades, there was only so much protection a vehicle designed for civilian uses could offer. The use of anti-tank missiles was simply too much for the armoured vehicles to withstand.

Alpha Group soldiers appeared from the woods, advancing by bounds and firing on the three remaining vehicles. The Presidential Security Service was hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by an assault force that numbered nearly a company’s worth of men. Trapped and with nowhere to go, however, they dismounted their surviving vehicles and counterattacked, firing back at their attackers and attempting to shield Medvedev, who cowered in the back of his limousine as it was racked with automatic gunfire. The bodyguards did well given their hopeless circumstances, killing six of their attackers. It didn’t take long for them to be subdued though. Most were killed where they stood, and those who surrendered were executed on the spot. Orders had already been given to Alpha Group that no prisoners were to be taken. Medvedev was unhurt when he was dragged from the back of his vehicle. A miniscule explosive charge was used to blow the lock off of the vehicle’s door, giving the attacking operators access to their primary target. Along with the surviving bodyguards and aides, Medvedev was shoved roughly to his knees at the side of the road by gloves hands. The commandos, wearing black uniforms and with balaclavas covering their faces, said nothing.

There was no ceremony. Everyone who had been captured was rapidly shot dead by the side of the road.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, other events were taking place in relation to the coup d’état. Soldiers from the 98th Guards Airborne Division, a part of the Moscow Military District under Colonel-General Gerasimov, deployed to the Russian capital by truck and helicopter, under orders to secure vital infrastructure. They did not know the truth about what was happening or that Medvedev had been killed by the FSB. Those paratroopers were informed that a terrorist incident had taken place and that it might have been part of an American-backed attempt to topple the Russian government. Heavily-armed paratroopers secured the Kremlin, the Defence Ministry, and the Communications Ministry as well as Domodedovo International Airport. The troops met no resistance from security forces across the city as the putsch unfolded because for all everybody knew they were acting to put down a coup rather than launch one. In the Kremlin and the Communications Ministry, several civil servants and political aides, appointees of President Medvedev, were arrested by paratroopers and taken rapidly under FSB supervision to Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison. Figures in the military and the government who might pose a threat to the new regime were all detained under the pretence that they themselves had had some involvement in this nefarious – and fictional – CIA plot to overthrow the Russian government.

It was all over by evening, Moscow time.

Men of the VDV had secured the Russian capital and armed soldiers stood guard outside every key government facility. Vladimir Putin, now the President of the Russian Federation, was driven to the heavily-guarded Kremlin, where he stood in front of journalists both from Russia itself and from around the globe. There, the newly-minted Russian President gave an emotional speech in which he informed the Russian people that President Dmitri Medvedev had been assassinated near Vladivostok, and many of his security staff and aides were dead too. He said that there was a terrorist plot, connected to the Autumn Movement, to take over Russia and disband the state, replacing it with anarchism.

He also said that the FSB was investigating the possibility that the Central Intelligence Agency was linked to this heinous conspiracy.

Fifteen

Explosions roared across the countryside, shooting great fireballs into the sky as artillery rounds thundered down. Fencer & Frogfoot strike fighters unleashed their bombs and missile, annihilating enemy formations with high-explosives, napalm, fuel-air explosives and countless other types of weaponry. The Fulcrums & Flankers soared far overhead, guided to their opponents by massive, lumbering Antonov AWACS radar planes. On the cold winter ground, grassy fields that had already turned to sludge under a torrent of rain and snow were littered with formations of T-90s, T-80s & T-72s, joined by infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers laden with motor riflemen. Havoc & Hind attack helicopters covered the advancing armoured formations, flying at treetop level to launch anti-tank missiles and unguided rockets. Paratroopers leapt from cargo planes, landing deep behind enemy lines and sewing chaos into the ranks of the opposing forces. In the Baltic and Barents Sea’s, warships traversed the icy waters, launching cruise missiles and firing their guns in support of the naval infantrymen who stormed ashore ahead of the main landing forces. Behind the scenes, commanders ordered troops into action and plotted fire missions, calling in bombardments of their opponents. Radio-electronic units bombarded the airwaves with false information and sought to jam enemy transmissions to disrupt them from calling in firepower of their own. For all intents and purposes, it was an all-out war.

Nobody died though, except by accident. The targets weren’t real. They were look-alikes and models of contemporary western military equipment. All this was part of the massive WINTER STORM military exercise that the new regime in Moscow had elected to hold shortly before the New Year. In a repeat of previous Zapad military exercises, Russia was again practicing a full-scale war against the NATO alliance. Involving over 250,000 troops, it was one of the largest military exercises in Russian history, dwarfing even the exercises held in the previous winter. Normally, Russia would hold massive exercises focusing on different regions – the West, the Far East, the South and the North – once per year, with the threat in each area being addressed with the exercises. This was the second year running which the yearly exercises had focused solely on the threat from Europe. This was because President Putin saw the NATO alliance as the greatest threat to Russian sovereignty since Hitler’s divisions had come swarming over the Dnepr in the Second World War. Nobody in Moscow even alleged that American tanks would come rolling towards Moscow, but in the Kremlin, Putin and his followers solemnly believed that there was a vast western conspiracy to undermine his government and have the Russian people rise up against him. NATO support for the rebellious movements in the Balkans in the 1990s was cited as a perfect example of the West’s strategy of knocking off governments which it opposed or felt threatened by. It was a simple model; allow for civil war to break out or for the populace to take to the streets in insurrection, and then support the rebels with logistics and airstrikes.

The Kremlin was preparing for the day it might have to defend itself against such a threat by taking pre-emptive military action against NATO. An elaborate scenario was practiced. There was no fictional country being invaded this time round. The Russian Armed Forces practiced a scenario in which a full-scale revolution was breaking out in Russia, to which Moscow responded by ordering an occupation of the Baltic States. The three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were undoubtedly NATO’s most vulnerable member states, surrounded by borders with Russia and Belarus, a long-term ally of Russia. It was felt that in the scenario being practiced, the Russian Military could rapidly overwhelm the Baltic States and use them as bargaining chips to force the West to back down from its plan to bring down the Russian government, in return for the Baltic States – Minus their Russian-majority areas, of course. Contrary to what tabloids in the West would claim, President Putin didn’t want to fight this war, but he felt that Russia was being pushed in a direction that made it ever more likely.

In its ‘dry-run’ of an invasion of the Baltic States, Russian forces practiced a variety of tactics and strategies developed from the previous war in Georgia, as well as the series of smaller exercises which had taken place across not only Russia but Belarus and Central Asia too. It was understood that the Kremlin was outgunned when faced with the entirety of what the NATO alliance could field, and so Moscow wanted to utilise ‘hybrid warfare’ as part of its strategy. This would involve sending in Spetsnaz commandos to hit NATO’s command & control infrastructure as well as stir up discontent amongst Russian-speakers in the Baltic States at the beginning of an invasion. For the purpose of WINTER STORM, this would be followed by a series of large-scale cyber-attacks as well as strikes by aircraft and cruise missiles of the Long Range Aviation Command. The Russian Air Force practiced this as well, flying several sorties in which the launching of conventionally-tipped – but nuclear capable – cruise missiles was practiced against targets that would be of vital importance to NATO. This extended as far west as Great Britain, with a practice bombing run made of several civilian airports and military airfields within the British Isles as well as in Denmark and Germany. On multiple occasions, NATO aircraft scrambled to intercept and escort the bombers. In a real conflict, the ability of the alliance to successfully do this would be limited by the extremely long range of Russian missile systems. Paratroopers came next, with men from various divisions and brigades of the VDV practicing airborne drops onto targets that simulated a large number of ports and airfields across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Finally, the Russians practiced something that they had perfected decades ago; massed armoured and mechanised assaults. Thousands of men rode inside BMPs and BTRs, while main battle tanks laid down massive amounts of fire.

It was a massively impressive spectacle to behold.

Much of the Russian Ground Forces’ tank force consisted of older T-72 systems, which had been upgraded in large numbers in recent months. Joining them were the newer T-80s & T-90s. Soldiers learned how to work together and cooperate with higher command in a real-time battle situation. The communications issues which had plagued the Russian Military during the Georgia War had largely been addressed, and new equipment had been ordered to ensure that commanders on the ground could communicate more effectively with their troops. Airstrikes and artillery was effectively called in, with the bombers and gunners using live munitions to simulate the stress of combat. Though Russian troops had fought in Chechnya and Georgia – a few of the older personnel had even had their faces in the dirt in Afghanistan – the majority of them had yet to see battle. Conscripts being introduced to their training cycles suddenly found themselves in something that very closely mirrored the heat of battle. Satellite guidance systems proved effective, as did the replacement of smaller and less visual parts such as outdated or broken computer chips and radio batteries. None of this was all that public; President Putin could show off new tanks and warplanes, but not new ground-targeting systems fitted into Su-25 strike planes. Nevertheless, he understood the necessity for it all.

WINTER CROWN was deeply troubling to watch from the West. It was the second exercise that violated the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, with that document requiring that NATO observers be allowed to witness large-scale wargames such as this one. The lack of an invitation from Moscow drew condemnation from Western capitals, but there was little NATO or anybody else could do other than offer criticism. Tabloid papers in the West screamed that it was the beginning of a new Cold War, invoking imagery reminiscent of the 1980s. From their embassy stations in Moscow, the CIA and the lesser known Defence Intelligence Agency tried to analyse the ongoing exercises and learn as much about Russia’s military capabilities as they could. The few remaining human intelligence (HUMINT) sources that NATO intelligence agencies ran in Russia offered what help they could, and the DIA listened in on some communications between Russian commanders, learning much even from short snippets of conversations. Joining in on this effort was an ‘alphabet soup’ of other agencies from across Europe. Britain’s MI6 and Frances DGSE also conducted operations of their own on a large scale, with more resources available to them than to smaller services. Poland, the Baltic States, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Romania and Belgium were all conducting intelligence-gathering operations of one sort or another throughout the duration of WINTER STORM. On several occasions, U.S. Air Force EC-135 Rivet Joint electronic surveillance aircraft flew close to the Russian border, gathering signals intelligence (SIGINT) from Russian radio traffic. In turn, they were intercepted by Russian fighters and would promptly leave the area.

The West concluded that Russia had made some massive advances in terms of both offensive and defensive capabilities since the lowest ebb of the Russian Armed Forces in the 1990s and early 2000s. Troops were being deployed rapidly and with few real logistical difficulties, and new technologies were being employed. Of particular concern was electronic warfare, which had been more effective than expected when utilised against Georgian forces. NATO held an overall superiority over Russia in terms of troops, aircraft, ships, and tanks, but still the Alliance found itself playing catch-up when faced with Moscow’s newfound military prowess.





Sixteen

A court in St. Petersburg sentenced Professor Smith (*note1) to three years imprisonment for the crimes he had been found guilty of. The British national had been granted the speediest of trials and it was one where he had little rights within. Justice for historical revisionism which defamed the Russian people, like it was for those charged with corruption and treason, was only going to have one outcome. That outcome was to be found guilty and to be punished accordingly. The history lecturer who had openly stated that Soviet soldiers during the Great Patriotic War had committed war crimes – the rape of tens of thousands of women & girls in Germany being foremost among them – was only one of many caught up in this latest crackdown which was a small part of a campaign of whipping up nationalistic feelings nationwide. His was the most high-profile case though with Professor Smith being an international figure. He had said these things before Putin, ruling by decree in all but name, had declared such comments to be a crime. This retroactive punishment was therefore the highlight of foreign attention upon the issue of the detention of Professor Smith. Russia was breaking with so many international norms with this behaviour. Other dictatorial regimes would have been a bit more creative and tried to hide behind lies with regard to procedural matters in doing something like this. Putin was doing no such thing. There were dozens of cases such as this where the actions taken by the Soviet Union and the modern Russian Federation which had been criticised in academia and the media afterwards were reacted to with arrests made and prison sentences given to those who had made such statements. The corruption charges against others, plus the treason accusations with regard to those supposedly behind the Medvedev assassination, were also working their way at rapid pace through the courts. There were other foreign nationals caught up in this though they in almost all other cases concerned those from former Soviet states. The Briton given three years in prison for something such as this, and the manner in which it was done, shone the international spotlight on Russia though. There had been a flight of foreign nationals out of Russia following Putin’s declaration of martial law and this only increased with events such as the conviction of Professor Smith. Many countries made public statements decrying such an act and once again urged their citizens to leave Russia. Few consulates in cities other than Moscow where Western diplomatic facilities where remained open now and at the embassies in the capital, there was only skeleton representation after non-essential staff and all family members had left. Employees of non-governmental organisations and businesses which were left operating within Russia generally followed this advice. Russia wasn’t a safe place to be for Westerners to be.

The Brown government in London protested as much as it possibly could to what happened with Professor Smith. The whole thing was recognised fully for what it was. This was highlighted in public statements, comments to the media, and remarks made in Parliament. Nothing could be done for him though. The pressure was kept up to keep international attention on Russia while at the same time make sure that no other Briton ended up facing a similar fate. In response, the prime minister had his government expel a multitude of Russian diplomats and instructed his foreign secretary to begin an extension to international efforts to punish the Kremlin for the actions taken here and with other issues. Miliband got to work on that though by this stage there were few things left that could be done where there would be multinational agreement to act any further than already done. Russia was still exporting oil and gas but that was limited and ‘complications among allies’ meant that it would continue to do so to several countries for the time being. At the same time, there were further matters when it came to Russian activities which concerned the Brown government. The exile community centred on London – those who had been in Britain for some time and the new arrivals – continued to make a lot of noise as well as engaging in disputes between themselves. They had the attention of the media plus many members of Parliament and quite honestly revelled in that too. The prime minister referred (in private) to the two groupings as ‘Berezovsky’s mob’ and ‘Nemtsov’s circle’. There were others but these were the two primary gatherings of Russians who used London as a base of operations to not just speak out against the Kremlin but actively plot and scheme against Putin to bring him down. Outside of these exiles themselves, they had their supporters and their critics. Among the latter, there was a lot of open displeasure from the critics at the actions taken by the exiles, especially Berezovsky’s mob. Saying and doing what they did naturally attracted the attention of Moscow. Kozak really was a far different character from his predecessor Lavrov: the new foreign minister issued threats against these people in response to their open talk of regime change. Moreover, he also repeated earlier warnings over the ‘dire consequences’ which Britain would suffer if any of these plotted actions spoken about took place with a base of operations for them being London. Some of those diplomats expelled from the Russian embassy were suspected of spying upon these exiles while another was strongly suspected to be preparing to kill Berezovsky within days of his forced expulsion from the country. Both groups of exiles were considered by the Brown government to be in very real danger. At Heathrow Airport, another suspected Russian hitman, this time without diplomatic cover and posing as a Belorussian tourist, was detained and put back on a flight to Moscow. MI-5 and the Met. Police found numbers of their officers pulled from anti-terror tasks to safeguard the lives of these opponents of the Kremlin. For one of those police officers, the end result for him personally would be fatal.

Detective Constable Jones (*note2) was shot and killed on November 12th. The police officer was with the Met.’s Counter-Terrorism Command – also known as SO15, this element of Specialist Operations dealt with espionage matters too – and was an accidental crossfire victim of a shooting incident between a member of Berezovsky’s mob and a gunman sent by the Kremlin. DC Jones was unarmed when killed. The married officer with two young children received urgent medial attention but died in hospital from gunshot wounds; a bodyguard for the exile in question was also killed in this shootout in leafy Berkshire. As to the gunman, he was an SVR officer who’d entered the country on a false Ukrainian passport and got back out on a Slovakian one despite the best efforts of the British authorities to catch him. The entry and egress concerning him was the only part of this SVR mission which went to plan. Russia’s foreign intelligence agency was playing big with many tasks undertaken ranging from activities in Britain to elsewhere in the world too. That Chappaqua Connection was where it remained having most success yet there had been a recent expansion in scale of operations. The SVR had people in America and others elsewhere throughout Europe. Some were gathering intelligence while others were working to sew discord among the West in their standoff with Russia. Operations were going wrong in many areas despite many assurances given to the Kremlin that they were meeting success. The SVR was punching above its weight: this wasn’t the KGB of the Cold War era in terms of capability no matter how many boasts were made back in Moscow. The shooting in Britain was designed as ‘clean’ operation with a big payoff; that didn’t include the killing of DC Jones. The failure here would have many consequences in international relations though also later down the line for SVR operations through the coming months.


Imprisoning Professor Smith and shooting DC Jones did the Kremlin no favours in more than just Anglo-Russian relations. Britain was absolutely furious and the scale of public anger they whipped up was in many ways similar to what they were trying to achieve at home with their own people. That certainly wasn’t an intention of Putin. Nor was causing the diplomatic actions and military readiness preparations afterwards.

Senior British politicians have the attachment ‘the Right Honourable’ after their name when printed in official documents. To many people, whether they were honourable was a matter of contention! However, the point was that those considered to be such were because they were members of the Privy Council. Members of the government and the top ranks opposition were all technically advisers to the monarch who remained head of state. Membership of the Privy Council wasn’t a sinecure post: it was rather significant. Ministers shared information with their shadows with the other parties on Privy Council terms. This was done because the opposition was meant to be a government-in-waiting and there were things that their leaders should know. What they were informed of wasn’t meant to be used for petty party politics. Through the year, as events in Russia defied all previous worst fears, Brown authorised the extension of information sharing with the opposition through the Privy Council on matters relating to events there which affected Britain; Blair had done the same in the lead-up to the Iraq War. David Cameron and Nick Clegg each agreed to Brown’s request that these matters remain confidential especially since they concerned the highest matters of state. Shadow spokespeople with foreign, defence, home affairs and also national security briefs met with their counterparts from the Brown government or were briefed by civil servants. Despite the promises given by the leaders of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to the Labour leader, there were leaks made from their teams. These were unattributable to those involved and thus came with plausible deniability. Moreover, in several exchanges of unpleasantness behind the scenes, there came counter-allegations that the members of the Brown government were using events concerning Russia for their own end too and making leaks of their own. The acrimony over these leaks brought about an end to much of the information sharing beyond the basics by early November though the shooting of DC Jones the saw a course change and further meeting of Brown, Cameron and Clegg where they all once agreed to cut out the partisanship at a time like this. The country would be going to the polls next year and it didn’t look like before then the Russia issue was just going to vanish into the night. Admiral Lord West, Labour’s minister of state for security & counter-terrorism, established a good working relationship with his Conservative shadow in the form of Baroness Neville-Jones in the aftermath of the killing of DC Jones. At the other end of the scale of what was meant to be non-partisan cooperation on matters of national importance, the relationship between Bob Ainsworth and Liam Fox was fraught with continued acrimony.

Fox was the shadow defence secretary and was informed by Ainsworth ahead of the announcement that the Royal Navy was going to postpone next year’s planned refit of the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. This exchange of information was done to build cross-party support. From the Fox camp, there came comment made the very next day in anonymous terms in a newspaper article with regard to Conservative urging to do just this in light of international tensions where Russian military exercises had been conducted in the forceful manner that they had been against Britain. The political interpretation was that the Conservatives were arguing that this should be done and it looked to Labour that once the announcement was made that this was being done, Fox could claim that the Conservatives had forced this to occur. Brown made an angry call to Cameron with the latter denying that this had been the way of things; he said that the Conservatives weren’t playing politics with Britain’s national security. In response, Ainsworth would no longer meet Fox personally and instead do everything through civil servants. He made his announcement to the House of Commons concerning the matter of the Illustrious’ delayed refit and commented that this was a ‘reasonable precaution’. Fox stood up in reply to the statement and questioned whether the government was going to bring the Fleet Air Arm’s Sea Harriers back out of storage and fly them from that carrier and the others in service instead of just the RAF’s ground attack Harriers. That hadn’t been covered in the Privy Council meetings and was a valid question… but it was all politics really. The whole issue over a delayed refit of one small aircraft carrier and which aircraft would fly from it ignited a political storm which on the face of it, it really shouldn’t have. Journalists were then briefed on the background of the dispute between the minister and his shadow here, thus forcing out into the open the whole series of inter-party cooperation behind the scenes on the matter of Britain’s readiness to meet Russia’s aggressive behaviour. In turn, Russia declared the whole Illustrious matter to be ‘provocative’ and a ‘challenge which would be met’. Despite all of this domestic political rancour, the prime minister was meeting with Cameron and Clegg again, plus authorising more disclosures of information to them, before the end of the month once again concerning Russia. This was to do with the late 2009 simultaneous situations in both the Baltic States and the Ukraine.

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.





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.

Twenty-Three

Despite the fact that Turkey had been a member of NATO since the alliance had first formed, relations between Turkey and the United States were growing evermore strained throughout the early 21st Century. In 2003, Turkey had failed to allow U.S. forces to strike into northern Iraq from its territory, thus complicating the invasion and forcing several risky Special Forces operations to take place in place of a mechanised invasion. In part, the cooling of relations was due to Turkey’s continuously repressive policies towards the Kurdish populations in the south, and Turkey’s military intervention in northern Iraq in 2008. Though Turkey was, at least on paper, a democracy, it had a poor human rights record when compared with Western nations. President Obama had visited Turkey in the spring of 2009 in an effort to repair relations between the two countries. However, the newly-inaugurated President’s visit had achieved very little in the grand scheme of things, and Turkey continued to drift away from NATO despite its longstanding membership. The U.S. believed – not incorrectly – that Turkey was sliding further towards Islamism, with the nations’ foreign policy being systematically realigned on that basis. The U.S. was concerned by this slide in its traditionally secular ally. In Turkey, the Armed Forces served as not only the guardians of the nation but also of the traditional secular political order, which had led to several coups throughout the Cold War.

Organised by the Free Gaza Movement & the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights, Freedom & Humanitarian Relief (IHH), a large flotilla of transport ships left Turkey in May of 2010. The ships in the flotilla carried over ten thousand tonnes of humanitarian aid, including food, generators, wheelchairs and children’s toys, as well as construction materials. Before the 2008-09 Gaza War, five similar shipments had been allowed through the Israeli blockade imposed on Gaza, but following that conflagration, the Israeli’s had ceased to allow shipments of aid through their blockade. The route of the Gaza-bound flotilla took them south of Cyprus and towards the Israeli coast, where they were tracked and monitored by Israeli intelligence.

Israel offered for the six ships that formed the flotilla to dock at the Port of Ashdod so that the cargo could be inspected, but this offer was turned down by the Turkish crews manning the ships, for fear that they could be turned back their or that their cargo could be confiscated by those searching the ships. Israeli intelligence felt that letting the ships dock in Gaza was too much of a risk, due to their uncertainty over the contents of the cargo, and thus operation to forcibly board the vessels and search their contents was authorised.

This would turn out to be a major mistake on the part of the Israeli’s, drawing condemnation from around the world and further splitting the fragile alliance between the United States and Turkey.

Early in the morning on May 31st, Israeli commandos from Shayetet-13 took part in Operation SEA BREEZE. Israeli troops boarded all six of the cargo ships from a mixture of armed speedboats and naval helicopters, using the fast-roping technique to land on the ships from above. The boarding teams carried riot-guns with baton rounds to subdue unruly passengers, but they were also armed with concealed firearms. They reportedly faced resistance from about forty of the over five hundred people aboard the ships. Scuffles broke out between the Turkish passengers, including many charity workers, and the Israeli naval commandos. Passengers were alleged by the Israeli’s to have fought back with crowbars and knives. One Israeli team commander was thrown overboard, while another soldier was stabbed by a passenger. The commandos searched room-by-room, clearing out the ships with stun grenades and assault weapons.

According to the Israelis, their troops hadn’t opened fire until one activist had attempted to seize a rifle from a soldier, but there was little conclusive evidence as to what really happened offered by either side. In the initial melee of violence, the troops were ordered to use live ammunition to clear out the ships, and to crush an opposition violently and swiftly.

The ultimate result of this were the deaths of eight Turkish civilians and one Turkish-American.

They had died after being shot down with automatic weapons wielded by heavily-armed Shayetet-13 commandos. A further five hundred people were detained in Israel under military arrest after being subdued aboard the ships. The raid drew widespread condemnation from around the world, including a series of especially vitriolic – but private – outbursts. Turkish President Abdullah Gul would later take part in a press conference where he would tell the world that he considered this to be the first armed attack on Turkey since the First World War. Moscow opposed the Israeli actions as a method of drawing Turkey further away from its allies, knowing that the United States would be hesitant to openly support Turkey or condemn Israel. Within Turkey itself there was outrage even after those by the Israeli Military had been released from custody and sent home. The United States never publicly condoned the actions of the Israeli Military, but nor did it condemn them.

No U.S. President could publicly denounce Israel without facing major opposition in Congress and at the polls, and so the Obama Administration chose to respond with a wary silence.

The United States was struggling to maintain impartiality in the bitter split between two of its key allies. Due to the pro-Israel nature of the United States, however, the result of the disagreement was a decision that had already been made, and one in which President Obama had very little choice. The U.S. just couldn’t openly condemn Israel. Despite this, conversations between Obama Administration officials and their Israeli counterparts did inform the Israeli’s of the general displeasure of the U.S. with the course of action that Israel had chosen to undertake. None of this was public though; America was desperately trying to prevent Israel from carrying out any similar actions in the future while also attempting to maintain good relations with Turkey. Similar behind-the-scenes conversations took place between American and Turkish officials, with the goal being to persuade the Turks that they were an ally of value to the United States while similarly making the U.S. look pro-Israeli or at least impartial in the public eye.


Turkey, unfortunately, saw it all very differently. The Turkish government interpreted the lack of condemnation as a public endorsement of Israeli’s actions by the United States government, an act which only served to further infuriate them. Although the Americans tried to explain that this was not the case, and that America really did oppose what Israel had done, this answer was just unacceptable to grieving Turkish mothers and widows. Demonstrations took place outside NATO’s Incirlik Airbase, located in Turkey. It was a crucial facility both for the United States and for NATO as a whole, and although the Turkish government hadn’t even considered shutting the base down, it was a subject of contention across the country. Turkish civilians and officials alike were asking why they should allow the U.S. to operate military forces from their soil when Americans wouldn’t lift a finger to oppose Israel when that country chose to slaughter unarmed men and women aboard humanitarian ships. Moscow watched all this develop with a keen smile. The SVR was monitoring the situation from stations across Turkey, with this all headquartered at the Russian embassy in Ankara. Turkey had been one of the few NATO countries not to withdraw its ambassador from Moscow after Putin had violently seized power. Relations between the two countries were not exactly good, but they were being driven in a more positive direction by the ongoing dispute between Ankara and D.C.

Russia had a long history of attempting to destabilise relations between countries which opposed its own geopolitical goals, but this time there was no need for such active measures; the U.S. and Turkey were tearing themselves apart without the need for Russian intervention. Nevertheless, the SVR would continue to use its own methods to try to worsen the relationship between the two NATO countries. The abrupt circulation of false news about both Turkish and American activities against one another occurred, with articles of such a manner being published online and spread across social media sites such as Twitter; Russian contacts within Turkish protest organisations – ranging from Islamist to liberal to Kurdish – orchestrated demonstrations with some success, attempting to keep the crowds in place outside Incirlik Airbase. It was all fairly mundane really; there were no assassinations like the ones that had rocked the British capital, nor were there false flag terrorist attacks. What was being done was primarily taking place through social media and relatively benign protest movements.

And it was working.





Twenty–Four

Across the whole of the Baltic region, there remained an extremely tense situation as June 2010 arrived. Since the New Year when NATO had begun its military deployment to protect the Baltic States and Poland, while facing down Russian aggression, countries on the shores of the waters of the Baltic prepared for war. There were domestic and foreign military forces in the region who operated on the ground, in the air and at sea. Some stayed fixed in-place; others took part in expansive exercises. Governments were working towards making sure that war didn’t break out here yet there were more and more people becoming convinced that soon it surely would.

Through the Baltic Sea itself, this important seaway for civilian ships was increasingly where military deployments were being made. There were warships, submarines and combat aircraft all involved. These had a detrimental effect upon commercial shipping as well as civilian aircraft too with those armed forces’ deployments facing mock attacks made against the participants and everyone not involved in the way of them. Russia’s Baltic Fleet was out with its vessels and aircraft and they had been joined by NATO forces in these crowded waters. Sweden felt compelled to act as well with its own deployment due to the threat of territorial infringement along the shoreline of mainland Sweden plus its island holdings within the Baltic. The Swedes were present when Russian and NATO forces conducted their war-games to intimidate the other. NATO wasn’t just a victim here but an active participant. What Russia did, it did back to Russia. Many near-misses with ships and aircraft coming close to collision occurred as well as close-calls when it came to one side almost opening fire upon the other but stopping at the very last moment when the other backed off from seemingly imminent attacks. There were Russian naval movements between the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland where St. Petersburg was and down to Kaliningrad during the war games. Few warships made that journey and instead it was chartered civilian shipping. NATO watched these movements and studied from afar what the contents were of the freight moved: it was all military equipment & stores. They themselves were active off the Polish coastline but also in the water offshore from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The coastlines of all four NATO members, especially those of Estonia and Latvia, were rather exposed and would certainly be vulnerable to Russian attack in wartime. NATO forces operated here now in peacetime as they practiced defending them should they be subject to an attack. These were overt preparations for war though, as was the official NATO position and that of its member states individually too, all of this was defensive in context. Russia took a different view on these military exercises and considered that the only reason while NATO would be doing what they were was because they were planning for war and knew that a Russian counterattack would be made into these areas.

In the skies, military activity took place above the countries stretching inland to the east and south of the Baltic. NATO had sent one of their AWACS squadron from its base in Germany to Poland. Six of the E-3 Sentry aerial surveillance aircraft were now flying from Powidz Air Base, a facility in west-central Poland. On most occasions, there was at least one of these aloft. This gave coverage near twenty-four hours a day. With its radar and onboard operators, an aloft AWACS controlled NATO air space for hundreds of miles in every direction. NATO air activity was monitored but so too was the flights of Russian and also Belorussian aircraft inside their own territories. There were many military aircraft in the skies. Denied overflight above the Baltic States, Russian transport jets heading for Kaliningrad like those ships went down over the Baltic. There were also combat aircraft in the skies over western Russia and above Belarus. Some of these would charge towards the edges of the NATO countries before turning away at the last moment. NATO fighters, including those French Mirage-2000s at Šiauliai in Lithuania, were busy on interception missions. The recent addition of Belorussian jets in the skies – Belarus bordered Poland as well at Latvia and Lithuania – made the NATO task more difficult first by their presence and then as Russian fighters flew with them above Belarus too. A lot more coverage was needed due to Lukashenko’s actions in tying his country’s armed forces to those of Putin’s.

NATO troops in Latvia with the British-led Baltic Brigade stayed far away from both the Russian and Belorussian frontiers. They were a light force, a tripwire in-place supposedly to deter Russian territorial aggression into the Baltic States. If a Russian invasion came, or, even worse, a joint Russian-Belorussian attack occurred, they were doomed. This was something understood. The three small countries here each had their own armies too yet none of them, even joined by these NATO troops, were going to be able to stop an invasion. That wasn’t their mission though. They were here to deter one by their presence. Many of the officers and men with the Baltic Brigade were starting to feel very exposed out here. Intelligence showed the strength of possible opponents and that was worrying when presented to them. Around them, the local armed forces were working with NATO special forces troops on border patrols. There was the Russia proper frontier that Estonia and Latvia had plus Lithuania had that border with Kaliningrad. The border with Belarus now needed patrolling too. Covert entry by Russian agents and special forces was something they were working to stop by their presence due to the belief that they would come in to cause trouble within the Baltic States as recently done. Down in Poland, NATO forces there consisted of the Polish Army and that Cav’ regiment of the US Army: no more NATO ground forces were in the country despite claims made from the Kremlin that the Americans, the British and the Germans were on Polish soil in number. Small scale exercises took place rather than anything big. Early summer weather helped with this. Troopers from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment moved right into the very north-eastern corner of Poland at the beginning of June. They conducted exercises with Polish tankers in an area deemed the ‘Suwalki Gap’. There were Lithuanian troops active over on the other side of the Polish-Lithuanian frontier here also exercising defending this area against an attack coming into the Suwalki Gap from either east or west… or both. That was because this stretch of Poland provided a territorial buffer right between Kaliningrad and Belarus. In wartime, during an attack it was anticipated that the Russians and Belarusians would try to seize it. By doing so they would physically cut off the Baltic States away to the north from the rest of Poland. It wasn’t perfect tank country and this wasn’t that similar to either the Fulda Gap or the North German Plain of the Soviet era though there were some comparisons there in how a very modern NATO would aim to defend this area. Across in Kaliningrad – which, if history had gone another way in the 1990s, might well have become a fourth member of the Baltic States – the Russian Armed Forces watched those NATO war games without conducting their own. They were busy reorganising their own defensive forces before they would later practice any warfare. Troops here from two previous brigades were merged into a lone division and supporting assets reconfigured. Mobile missile batteries were transferred to new hidden sites and airfields were given upgraded defences. Engineering troops were on the frontiers of Kaliningrad: they were digging defensive positions and also scouting sites for wartime demolitions. Russia’s generals were looking at how NATO would invade Kaliningrad and doing everything to see that the region, sovereign Russian soil, shouldn’t fall in an attack. These defensive measures came with aircraft flights from Kaliningrad’s many airbases though on clear mock offensive tasks and also the activities of the brigade of Naval Infantry – Russia’s marines – within the region as well. Those marines undertook amphibious and airmobile operations along the shoreline. In wartime they would be going elsewhere. NATO intelligence summaries said that the 336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade had a wartime mission away from Kaliningrad (which was correct) either up in the Baltic States or possibly down on the shores of Poland in the Bay of Gdansk (which was incorrect).


The night of June 7th saw an incursion into Russian airspace. It was an accident though only sort of. With permission from the very top – Bob Gates gave the order: Bush’s defence secretary whom Obama had kept on despite the change in the White House –, US Air Force F-15E strike-fighters flew right on the very edge of the airspace off Kaliningrad’s coastline. These were jets based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK with the 48th Fighter Wing. Tanker support plus a divert field at Swidwin Air Base in Poland allowed them to be flying this far forward from East Anglia. Russian air activity with their bombers right off the coast of the mainland United States last month had seen Gates authorise flights of these tactical aircraft closer than before to Kaliningrad. There was a flight of four of them which overflew the Bay of Gdansk and then headed north along the edge of Kaliningrad. Moving at high speed in the darkness, they should have still not crossed the invisible line in the sky marking Russian airspace because they had their own state-of-the-art navigation gear and one of those AWACS aircraft was controlling their flight.

Well… they strayed into Russian airspace, even skimming above the edges of the Sambian Peninsula – the headland which pushed out into the Baltic – rather than just being above the water which legally belonged to Russia. Sukhoi-27 Flankers raced towards them. These were Russian Naval Aviation jets who had recently been busy buzzing NATO warships at low-level through the Baltic but a pair of them were on hot-alert at Chkalovsk Air Base tasked for air interception and given the go order once those four F-15s were above the Bay of Gdansk. They were thus on an intercept course before the airspace violation occurred. Each side had their advantages in this potential fight. The Americans had better aircraft & systems as well as greater training. The Russians were on home ground though (they had no worry over a fuel issue) and had a lot of recent experience. Numbers were a factor though – four against two – and there was too the fact that AWACS support alerted the Americans to the arrival of the Su-27s.

As quick as they were in, the Americans were out of Russian airspace and back out over the sea. They were looping back around when the fighters coming out of Kaliningrad approached. The F-15s broke into two pairs and swept back around coming towards the inbound Russians. Trigger fingers on both sides were at the ready. All that was waited for was for opposing rules of engagement to come into play. The US Air Force could only open fire if fired upon first. Russian Naval Aviation fighters had the same orders. These standing orders for the aircrews could be changed at any moment from on-high but none came. No shots were exchanged. The F-15s flew away first and racing towards a tanker out over the Baltic. Only then did the Su-27s head back overland to establish a patrol in case more American aircraft showed up to overfly Russian territory with arrogant perceived immunity from retaliation. The stand-off in the skies, with each set of aircraft conducting aggressive manoeuvres while flying at high speed armed with deadly weapons, was over in minutes.

In the days and weeks afterwards, there would be implications from this. American navigation procedures on the edge of Russian airspace were reviewed though they would continue to fly missions off Kaliningrad. Gates would push for Obama and Clinton to get the NATO Council (the Poles themselves would have no objection) to agree to station some of the 48th Wing in Poland afterwards. Russian military authorities in Kaliningrad would receive new orders when it came to airspace incursions. This had been the latest one of several with others made by larger reconnaissance aircraft though those had occurred just offshore and never before over land like this surely deliberate attempt had been. Aircraft would be shot down next time. A verbal warning would be given but unless that was obeyed at once with no hostile intent shown, air intruders would be downed whomever they were. Russia couldn’t have its sovereign airspace violated so nakedly at a time when the West was seeking weakness ready to invade.

Twenty-Seven

With tensions mounting internationally, the Baltic States feared an invasion from not only the east, but the south as well.

Due to their natural geographic locations, the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were completely encircled by the territories of either Russia or Moscow’s westerly ally, Belarus. NATO had vowed consistently to defend its most vulnerable members with military force, and had backed up those promises with the deployment of the Baltic Mechanised Infantry Brigade. Nevertheless, all three governments in the Baltic States new that the forward-deployed Baltic brigade would not be able to hold off a Russian offensive. NATO forces would be attacked from the west, south, and east by a force vastly superior in terms of firepower and logistics. Nevertheless, all three of the surrounded nations wanted to enlarge their armed forces to ensure that they could inflict heavy casualties on the invaders, and that even if any or all of the Baltic States were occupied, the armed forces of those nations could continue to resist enemy occupation forces behind the lines, paving the way for Allied forces to advance eastwards and liberate them. The Estonian Ministry of Defence quietly formed another infantry brigade for the Land Forces, doubling the number of deployable combat units. This was part of a comprehensive plan to prepare the country for war and allow the Estonian Land Forces to cover both potential approaches to into the country from Russia.

In Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, governments were also preparing civilian emergency protocols to deal with the prospect of an invasion. Evacuation routes were organised and makeshift shelters scouted for. Lithuania planned to use underground train tunnels to shelter civilians from Russian air raids, while the Latvian emergency services made plans to move fire-fighting equipment out to positions away from their population centres to prevent them from being destroyed by the bombing. Military reservists from all walks of life were going through retraining at a rapid pace, and although formal mobilisation orders had not yet been issued, the three Baltic countries were preparing for those instructions to be given at a moment’s notice. Whatever the Baltic States did to prepare themselves to repel an invasion, however, would not be enough. Everybody in those countries new that, from military chiefs and government ministers down to schoolchildren who were old enough to understand the threat. People in the Baltic States had started to prepare themselves, both mentally and physically, for the prospect of living under foreign occupation once again. There was a run on items such as tinned food and ammunition for legally-owned firearms. Many of those who could afford to do such a thing were buying or renting properties overseas and were preparing flights out of the country in case the worst should occur.

Throughout the early days of their occupation by the Soviet Union, all three of the Baltic States had offered steadfast resistance. There was a proud tradition of fighting back, which traced its lineage back to the Forest Brothers of the 1940s & 50s. Those organisations had operated underground to oppose the Soviets after Russian forces had ‘liberated’ the Baltic States during World War Two. Thousands of partisans had taken to the countryside to fight back.

That resistance had lasted up until 1953, and nearly fifty thousand people had died as a result of the war. The Soviet Armed Forces had cracked down hard on the partisans, while the NKVD carried out numerous ‘false-flag’ atrocities, blaming their actions on the Forest Brothers in order to discredit the resistance organisations. Britain’s MI6 had supported the rebels with arms and logistical support as part of Operation JUNGLE, which had been thoroughly compromised by Kim Philby and others like him. It was the Forest Brothers tradition of defiance that gave birth to plans in Latvia and Estonia – though pointedly not Lithuania – to form their own covert resistance organisations to operate underground against future Russian occupiers.

The tactics and methods used by their ancestors over six decades ago allowed Estonia and Latvia to lay down the blueprints for future partisan operations. Military chiefs in both countries wanted to launch an organisation that would be a repeat of NATO’s stay-behind strategy during the Cold War. However, Operation GLADIO was highly controversial, and although much of it was still highly classified, GLADIO was known to have been dangerously unaccountable.


In fact, in an off-the-record quote attributed to an American intelligence officer serving with the Intelligence Support Activity in Latvia, the NATO stay-behind mission during the Cold War had been described as a “crypto-fascist CIA shit-show starring a bunch of former Nazis.” Though this officers’ comment was made casually and were perhaps somewhat exaggerated, the idea behind it was essentially correct. Estonia and Latvia were fundamentally democratic countries, and unaccountable paramilitary organisations running rampant around the countryside armed with government-supplied munitions wasn’t going to fly. Preparations to fight this kind of dirty war had to be done discretely, but those charged with carrying out stay-behind duties would firmly be under the control of elected governments.




Throughout June, Latvian and Estonian special operations and scout units began scouring the countryside for locations from which to mount resistance activities. Caves and cabins in the hills and woodlands of the Baltic States were found to serve as perfect hideouts, particularly the former. As the Americans had found in Afghanistan several years ago, caves served to hide tell-tale heat signatures given off by human beings that could be picked up on by patrolling helicopter gunships. The Estonians and Latvians were aided in their efforts by American commandos belonging to the 10th Special Forces Group, who were already deployed in-country in significant numbers. In addition to searching for hideouts that could be used, both Estonian and Latvian special operations teams and units of combat engineers began hiding caches of weapons. Everything from handguns to shoulder-launched missiles was stockpiled in well-hidden and guarded crates, buried beneath the dirt or tucked away in caves. These caches were heavily-secured to prevent criminals from getting their hands on such weapons, as there was fear of them doing. In addition, the Green Berets began teaching their hosts how to train and lead civilian resistors while in enemy-occupied territory. This was something that the Green Berets had done before, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. Particularly in the former example, local forces aided by twelve-man Green Beret ‘Alpha Teams’ were instrumental in bringing about a swift enemy defeat. The use of civilians could significant enlarge the resistance movements being run by military personnel, who would be in exile themselves.

Finally, after some debate, a final series of orders was issued to military units in the Baltic States. These orders instructed troops to continue to fight back even if all hope was lost; soldiers were not to comply with orders to surrender once a foreign – meaning Russian – invasion had begun. From that moment onwards, junior officers were to regard any orders to capitulate as treasonable, and to assume that they were either issued by foreign spies within the government, or by officials who were giving such instructions under duress. There were political issues when it came to orders such as these, with fears again emerging of rogue military units operating outside of the lawful chain of command, but defence officials were able to convince their political superiors that it was all just a plan that was in place for a worst-case scenario that might never even happen; without it, there was a risk that the capture of senior government officials, in keeping with Russia’s ‘hybrid warfare’ techniques, would bring about the total collapse of organised military resistance.

Ultimately, protocols such as these served to prevent a repeat of what had happened to Norway during the previous world war, where officials had been captured and the civilian authorities had ordered troops to lay down their arms and give up resistance. Though the Baltic States would likely fall in a war, they would go down fighting, bringing down enemy troops with them and then bogging down the invaders by forcing them to fight a costly, unpopular insurgency, hopefully allowed NATO to eventually surge forwards to the rescue and liberate the three Baltic democracies.

One final act to prepare for occupation was also taken in Latvia. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were drafted, in which instructions were written on methods of passive resistance that civilians could take part in. Available online as well as being published in newspapers, these leaflets taught people how to do simple tasks that were likely to cause great difficulty to occupying forces without landing those carrying them out in much immediate physical danger. Citizens were instructed on effective methods of organising protests and spreading information clandestinely, told how to construct road-blocks, and given insight as to how the occupying forces might conduct their counter-insurgency operations. It was written that citizens should always cooperate with their own security forces, but should be on the look-out for saboteurs or spies wearing recognisably friendly uniforms and speaking the local language.

The Baltic States were preparing for war.




Twenty–Eight

In late June 2010, the US Senate committees on both intelligence and the armed forces met in unpublicised closed sessions with several key high-ranking figures from the Intelligence Community and the military attending. Senators called in to see them the director of national intelligence & the CIA director for the first committee and the second committee met with the defence secretary & the chairman of the joint chiefs. The situation with Russia was the subject of these meetings. The Intelligence Select Committee had questions concerning whether there were any further Russian spies to be uncovered operating inside the United States as well as the scale of hostile Russian intelligence activities abroad. From the Armed Service Committee, queries came about how Russian military activities threatened the country and its NATO allies as well as the military situation on the ground in Eastern Europe. Reassurances came to the senators. There could be no guarantee that no more spies were active but the threat posed from any more of them was deemed minimal and the Intelligence Community – the alphabet soup of multiple agencies – was very busy in working to minimise the risk. Abroad, a briefing was given of Russian intelligence activities yet the senators were assured that the ongoing spy-mania was just that: too much hot air and little of anything of serious consequence. Defence secretary Gates and the nation’s most senior uniformed military officer each told those senators to whom they spoke that Russian military exercises and intimidation were just that. There was no indication that Russia was about to throw a war. Gates went further and explained this in detail. Any war which Russia launched would be one which it would lose. There would be few allies who would stand with the Kremlin and all of those would understand that once any war erupted, Russia was going to be defeated and they alongside them. Should there be a conflict, Gates conceded that the United States and its allies would take hard early blows but soon enough turn things around and go on to a crushing victory. They knew that in the Kremlin, he said: they weren’t idiots there. He was asked about the possibility of Russia putting troops into the Baltic States, even Poland, following on from inciting trouble and aiming to create a situation where they could claim that they were securing the peace. As the chairman of the joint chiefs did too, the secretary of defence made it clear that there were elements of the nation’s armed forces (plus those of their allies from Europe) ready to move forward to add to the already trip-wire force in-place should such a situation erupt. There were standing orders to move forward at the first sign of Russian creating a situation. In doing so, Russia would have to fight military forces of the United States in such a scenario, and that they wouldn’t do for the reason above: they would lose. That aside, once again, the senators on both committees were told many times that this wasn’t going to happen. Russia was posturing. There was an international dimension to this yet it was more about internal propaganda to keep Putin in power. Foreign bogeymen and colour revolutions were all about a domestic Russian factor. There was no war coming because Russia would lose one and therefore wasn’t about to do anything like that. The director of national intelligence – (retired) Admiral Blair; a man not currently in favour with the White House but holding onto his job through the skin of his teeth – staked his career on this assessment when talking to the senators.

On that day when talking to those senators that Admiral Blair gave that assurance, the CIA (who he was battling with) undertook an operation in Prague. Inside the capital of the Czech Republic, a black ops team detained a Latvian national and secured a cache of both documents and arms. There was no violence, no gun-fight, though the threat of each was used against those with the man who had a black hood thrown over his head before he was taken away with haste and they, with their hands up, left behind. This detainee was moved to a secret location – a ‘black site’ – over the border in Poland. Like he moved across Europe’s borders without hinderance when free, so he and his captors did when he wasn’t free. When in Poland there would be no problems from the locals as there would have been across in the Czech Republic. The Latvian considered himself a Russian and so did his captors. He had a Latvian passport and was a citizen there, but he was a Russian in reality. This tattooed man with Russian heritage that the CIA had kidnapped and smuggled away was a vor: a thief in law, a professional criminal. He was a member of the Russian mafia who had a trans-national reach across Europe. His business was smuggling weapons where those were supplied to anyone willing to pay. The CIA had had him in their sights for many years with the organised crime link known but he had recently come to their attention because he had expanded his operation into moving guns elsewhere. From across Western Europe, stolen weapons were being sent back to Latvia: the previous route out of Russia, through Latvia and onwards was closed off. The borders with Russia from the Baltic States were shut due to military activity yet there was a route for weaponry coming the other way which this vor was involved in. A tough man, a man who wouldn’t be easily broken, the CIA got him to talk regardless of that exterior. He spilled his guts when given ‘special treatment’. The weapons smuggler revealed his connection with the FSB – which wasn’t supposed to be the case for a ‘real’ vor was never supposed to cooperate with the state no matter what – and how he had been paid to transport advanced weaponry to Latvia to be used by others. Who exactly the guns were going to and for what purpose the detainee didn’t know. This couldn’t be got from him despite everything tried to make it so. The CIA only had a piece of the puzzle here but their captive was still a big prize in terms of breaking the smuggling he was doing and identifying the exact source of weapons already known to be arriving in the Baltic States to end up in the hands of Kremlin-backed separatists who were arming themselves at an alarming rate. There was a lot more work to do to progress with this operation. In the meantime, the vor would stay where he was: in a hell-hole hidden away from the rest of the world.


French intelligence activities weren’t so dramatic as neither that snatch by US Navy SEALs in Cyprus or this kidnapping of a criminal in Prague but they were ongoing as Russian activities were deemed a threat to French interests. President Sarkozy had been at the forefront of the attempt to maintain a united effort to stand up to Russia since the summer of 2008 and especially since last year’s assassination of Medvedev. There was a balancing act with allies which France was undertaking at the president’s direction. Paris had affirmed its commitment to the Baltic States and Poland as well as re-committing to NATO in a level of cooperation not seen since before de Gaulle threw his hissy-fit in the early 1960s. France worked with Britain and the United States (with the latter causing that issue with Admiral Blair) greatly in checking what the Kremlin was up to. There were successes and failures in this. A lot of the latter came from how France had to keep other allies, those within the EU such as Germany and Italy especially, onside as well when they were extremely hesitant about all that was going on due to economic factors. Neither the EU nor NATO was as fully united as they should have been. Rome was more of a problem that Berlin in this but neither were the governments in Athens, Brussels and Copenhagen keen on military commitments and hostile intelligence measures being made. Sarkozy had achieved quite the diplomatic coup in getting others in Europe to support that British-led effort to form a brigade-sized military deterrent force to Latvia though, in the end, France hadn’t joined in by directly committing troops to that. French jets were sent to Lithuania instead. France was ‘back in NATO’ though still on France’s terms.

France was also making moves in the intelligence field in reaction to ongoing events elsewhere. At home, the country’s domestic anti-espionage organisation (the DCRI) launched a wide-ranging investigation into possible indications that Russians had a spy network active. They had one in America and from what occurred in Britain, it looked like there was one there too. France hunted for one on its own soil. Initial investigations showed some breadcrumbs to be followed that there was one connected to the French foreign ministry yet nothing concrete could be run down in terms of evidence. It was frustrating for those involved at the sharp end of this when their superiors were under political pressure to find such spies which they told those below them were there: in such a situation, this should have been reversed. No spy ring was uncovered despite everything. Abroad, the DCRI’s counterpart, the better-known and far more important DGSE, had an important spy in someone else’s capital. France had a man in Moscow. They were unable to get a Russian official high-up where there was access to information though did manage to recruit the newly-appointed military attaché at the Ukrainian embassy in the Russian capital. This Ukrainian general was more-plugged in that others might have thought. The man who was willing to spy for France against Russia – claiming he wouldn’t against his own nation – was in a position that was only going to grow with importance as the months went on and into wartime too. The DGSE would, naturally, have liked to have an agent within the Kremlin or the Russian defence ministry but Russia’s relationship with the Ukraine would be important going forward and there would be information which would come from there. It would never be enough and wouldn’t change what was coming but it still would have significance. The general told the French something once recruited which was of immediate significance: he said that if France, NATO or the United States put major numbers of troops up against Russia’s borders, there would be war. This was his opinion as a Ukrainian and he could provide no evidence of such an assertion being what Russia would do. The DGSE listened to him and the officers in contact with him reported that up the chain of command. They did their job and relied on their superiors to do theirs with that information.


Neither Zatuliveter nor the alleged Russian intelligence officer picked up among the exiles in London was talking. These two that were in British custody didn’t do what Chapman, in American detention, was doing and spill their guts. The woman claimed whole-hearted innocence while the man said nothing. Hancock, the MP who’d had his private life spread like muck among the tabloid rags, emphatically defended his aide and suspected lover. As to the one of the two exile circles which the spy identified by Chapman belonged to, those around Nemtsov, there were those who stood by their comrade and those who now turned on him. Berezovsky and his people – the other grouping of troublesome Russians – denounced the ‘foolishness’ of their fellow exiles and asserted that this was all a Kremlin game of mirrors where they had in fact set this all up to sew division among anti-Putin figures within Britain. The whole thing was an absolute mess. MI-5 had had their operation blown early before they could get anywhere. Sweating the two arrested foreign nationals didn’t work. Torture might have but such an option wasn’t open to them… nor did they try to explore this option it must be said. Political interference was aplenty in demanding that answers were given. What were these Russians in custody really up to before caught? Were there more spies so far undetected? When were answers going to come?

Responding to this in a manner which would please the demanding politicians was impossible. British national attention when it came to matters relating to Russia were about to turn elsewhere though: away from home and back towards the Baltic again.