James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 14, 2019 12:58:32 GMT
One Hundred and Seventy Nine
Russian forces on Sakhalin had surrendered en masse after weeks of severe fighting. Casualties there had been horrendous after the fighting that had gone on all over the island. What had been planned as a fast victory with minimal losses had turned into one of the bloodiest and longest-lasting engagements of World War III. The objectives of seizing Sakhalin had been firstly to capture Russian oil-production facilities and secondly to seize territory which could be used further down the line in negotiations for the return of NATO territory that remained under Russian occupation.
Resistance had been steadfast despite the overwhelming odds against the Russian Armed Forces.
They were fighting for their homeland on Sakhalin even if it wasn’t physically connected to the Russian mainland. Allied ground forces had pushed inland despite the resistance they had faced. First US Marines and then Army troops along with Australian soldiers had fought in this bloody battle against the 33rd Motorised Rifle Division which had seen that formation not just destroyed but totally obliterated with less than three thousand of its members surviving to the moment that they surrendered.
That number included all of the wounded who would become POWs as well as those soldiers who were still in fighting condition.
Thousands of enemy POWs as well as wounded Allied troops were flown first to ships out in the ocean and then onwards to Hawaii, Seattle, and Australia for treatment or holding. Prisoners of War were to be sorted through as evidence of war crimes was searched for and the identities of the perpetrators uncovered. Unlike in Europe, the Russians had fought largely in accordance with international law because few prisoners had been taken by them and thus abuse of POWs was rare, while Sakhalin was populated by Russian civilians meaning that the armed forces were hesitant to utilise heavy weapons in urban areas.
There was still resistance across the island when the Russian military laid down its arms. Resistance groups had formed in the countryside and in the suburbs alike, manned by a mixture of isolated troops, FSB & MVD personnel, and even armed civilians.
Roadside bombs, sniper attacks, and ambushes were carried out in abundance by these cut-off pockets who were not officially a part of the 33rd Motorised Division and so hadn’t been ordered to surrender when that formation had finally caved.
One particular group of fighters, a platoon of teenage cadets led by their sergeant, a former naval infantryman, would become a particular thorn in the side of the occupying forces. Eventually, a film would be produced about the exploits of those boys and girls in opposing the Coalition occupation of their island.
Velichayshiy Iz Nas, or ‘The Greatest of Us’ would become a hit around the world, with the film portraying the horrors of the fighting on Sakhalin and the misguided patriotism of those involved – arguably on both sides – rather than being a pure action film. Similarly, the Australian film ‘I Was Only 19,’ which paid homage to an earlier song of the same name, also went out of its way to showcase the human side of the war.
Allied commanders in the Far East, led by the victorious Lt.-General Joseph Dunford, argued for a slackening of the air campaign against the Russian Far East. Targets there had been all but destroyed and those aircraft being used needed to be repaired. Pilots needed time to recuperate just like the ground troops below.
Many in Washington had been dismayed and surprised to see this attitude from commanders who were supposed to have been hard-chargers and hawks, but those on the ground had witnessed and led the fighting here rather than those at home.
One Hundred and Eighty
The secret meetings in Moscow among members of Putin’s inner circle continued.
Where it had first just been Gerasimov and Shoygu before Bortnikov joined them, there was now a fourth member who attended their conversations. Joining the C-in-C of the ground forces, the minister for emergency situations and the director of the FSB was now the head of Russian relations with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Lebedev, so long a trusted siloviki who owed everything to Putin, joined with the others in private talks.
They told each other that they weren’t plotting to oust Putin. Whether any of them truly meant that was up for debate. However, they stuck to that approach. It was the actions of the president’s advisers who they stated they were opposed to. Putin would make better decisions if it wasn’t them he listened to but instead this secret gathering of like-minded individuals. As before, the anger that these co-conspirators had was for members of the Security Council such as Kozak (the foreign minister), Makarov (the armed forces C-in-C), Patrushev (head of the Security Council) and Shlyakhturov (GRU chief). They had led Putin astray.
Students of history might note the historical connotations here with self-declared patriots trying to rid their king of those who gave bad advice, to be replaced by themselves, while absolving their God-like leaders of any blame. Again, whether any of them really meant what they said on this matter was up for debate. It was what they justified their actions with to each other when meeting though.
Lebedev joined with them due to the inability of himself to get the Security Council to listen to him when it came to what he believed was the disaster starring Russia in the face with regard to Russia’s allies in Central Asia. Those countries had been dragged into a war supposedly to defend Tajikistan but they wanted nothing to do with anything more than that. NATO and the Coalition was attacking them and Moscow would provide no help nor listen to their leaders when it came to working towards a way out of it for them. Lebedev found those who listened to him, were willing to agree with the solutions to this issue which he posed. Patrushev had shut him out of bringing that to the Security Council. He found others willing to listen.
The further issues remained among the others whom he was now meeting with. The war was being lost now they all agreed, and all because the wrong people had been listened to. Gerasimov and Shoygu had been cut out of the decision-making process and while Bortnikov retained his voice there, he found himself increasingly isolated too. The instructions which he was given to carry out were ones which he was now only following when he decided they were necessary. On other matters, he was opting to not carry them out as ordered yet lying to the Security Council with regards to outcomes. When running this past those colleagues of his, that made this a conspiracy and them all co-conspirators. Such would be the labels that Bortnikov’s FSB would give to any gathering like this that they discovered. Of course, he saw it differently.
What was their conspiracy about though? What outcome did it foresee? Were they going to act?
The meetings together as a three then a four came alongside smaller meetings of just the two of them. That two were Bortnikov and Gerasimov. The spymaster and the general had even more private discussions. Ideas as to how to get rid of the advisers around Putin were considered: the majority of those involved bring a violent end to such people with Bortnikov looking to rid the Security Council of Shlyakhturov and Makarov being the target of Gerasimov’s ire.
A cynic might say that the focus was on these two as they represented the biggest threats to their own personal ambitions.
No agreement was made on whether to yet give fatal ‘accidents’ to either man. There was still a bigger desire, above personal hatred, to do more than just that. The two of them still wanted something more. Killing those men didn’t solve the ultimate issue of the war being lost like it was. That was something that those on the Security Council wouldn’t admit but the four of them opposed to the advice being given to Putin on those grounds were sure of. The bad advice was causing the war to be lost.
NATO had its armies in Latvia and Lithuania. Kaliningrad was almost overrun and lost for good. They were marching through Belarus. Over the Kola, the American’s aircraft were active daily. Sakhalin and the South Kuriles were in Coalition hands. Central Asia was threatened with an invasion, even if it was a smaller one than seen elsewhere. US bombers had once more struck at strategic targets deep throughout Russia. There were no longer any allies of use with Libya & Syria soon to be doomed while Transnistria already lost and Belarus being conquered. Every military move made had been reversed. Intelligence efforts abroad had failed.
NATO was closing the noose around Russia’s neck.
The conspirators were informed about Operation Volk: Russia’s upcoming counteroffensive to catch NATO unawares and attack through the neutral Ukraine into Belarus. Even Lebedev was told of this officially because the Ukraine was a member of the CIS and there needed to be wheels greased. None of the believed that it would succeed in beating back the invasion they saw preceding onwards eventually to Moscow.
Bortnikov saw an opportunity arise from this. It was one he kept to himself. His co-conspirators would never have agreed to what he dreamed up in what he personally regarded as true act of genius.
There was an active FSB investigation which he was aware of, one taking place in the heart of Moscow. He had been briefed on it and now he took a personal interest in the case. The suspected spy wouldn’t be detained and disposed of, he informed the senior officer on the case: no, that wasn’t to be. Instead, Bortnikov had more information passed to him. It was all a plot, Bortnikov explained, to trap more spies. He personally selected what was to be revealed and assured his subordinate that it was something signed off on by the Security Council.
Who was that foreign spy? It was the Ukrainian military attaché.
Bortnikov thus betrayed the Volk counteroffensive. He believed it was the right thing to do. He took action that the others wouldn’t agree with to NATO to now do his dirty work for him. Once it played out, that would begin the process of seeing Putin’s advisers fall. Common sense could then break out and this disastrous war ended.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
Posts: 7,608
Likes: 8,833
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:42:40 GMT
One Hundred and Eighty One
Some weeks ago, American Tomahawk cruise missiles had struck what was thought to be a command and control facility for Russian forces. It would transpire that the complex had instead been a 'defensive' biological research complex housing samples of the deadliest diseases known to man. Illnesses such as plague, anthrax, smallpox and others were stored there. When the building was destroyed most of those samples had burned with it and yet there had been a leak of a sample of the Marburg Virus, specifically a Soviet-designed species known as Variant U.
From the now destroyed facility Variant U had spread into parts of St Petersburg and into Belarus and the Baltic States with troops using transport facilities in those places spreading the illness as they went.
Harsh, some might say extreme, quarantine measures had been enacted against those infected and throughout Russia's second city. To the immense relief of many but also somewhat surprisingly, there was much success met in containing the outbreak with martial law already in effect.
Nevertheless, hundreds fell victim to Marburg, a disease which had no known cure or vaccine. About all that could be done for those infected was the administration of morphine for the pain. As those drugs ran out with the influx of war casualties medical staff turned to heroin as a painkiller for their patients. Worse was the fact that since Variant U attacked the blood vessels, eventually painkillers became useless for the victims of the disease.
Even with all of these horrific scenes, doctors and nurses, urged on by the gun barrels of the police and MVD, kept the vast majority of patients isolated until they died, at which point the bodies were disposed of with extreme caution.
Soldiers on the frontline, however, had fewer resources to combat the spread of the infection. When men began to fall ill they were hastily quarantined but in combat soldiers often shared food, hot drinks and water, and cigarettes. Even a contagion with a relatively low (in comparison with the flu for example) infection rate spread like wildfire amongst many units until the use of NBC equipment and other precautionary measures was ordered.
The only saving grace was that due to the nature of warfare, most troops only ever talked to or socialise with members of their own companies, preventing the disease from spreading as fast as it could have in peacetime.
NATO troops began falling ill as well when enemy personnel who happened to be infected fell into captivity.
Behind-the-scenes communication between Western governments and figures in Russia's intelligence community meant that the Coalition was aware of the nature of the outbreak and that CBRN defensive measures were immediately imposed with significant effect despite the fact that the wearing of gas masks and NBC equipment drastically reduced the combat capabilities of Allied units as well as Russian ones.
One Hundred and Eighty–Two
The trio of Spetsnaz strike teams which had struck at targets within the Continental United States (CONUS: the Lower 48) during August had all been wiped out in the end. Those super soldiers from Russia had on each occasion met their end either at their targets – Tinker AFB in Oklahoma and Creech AFB in Nevada – or in the case of those who assassinated Obama in Washington, before they could flee the country. They had killed many people and caused a lot of destruction. Murdering the US President (as well as so many high-ranking Obama Administration figures) had been damaging too. However, when added all up, the real value was little. America got a new president, the US Air Force was still flying E-3 Sentrys and the Americans had their drones flying overseas. Back in Moscow, they had underestimated how much could be achieved by their Spetsnaz operations. A significant blow was made against the plans for further missions too when the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted their own operations first into Mexico and then down further south into Latin America. Crippling the United States’ war effort by causing distractions at home had failed.
What the Americans hadn’t been able to do though was to go after the supporting network inside CONUS. They unleashed an orgy of violence against it close to America’s borders but not inside the country. The GRU still many of had its ‘facilitating agents’ alive. These were long-term sleepers. A couple had been lost when JSOC elements operating with Task Force Hunter had taken out the Obama kill team but the majority had evaded detection. These were the people who had been in the country for years. They lived under false identities with no interest attracted to them. They pretended to be either foreign nationals from third party countries or naturalised citizens from them: none of those countries included Russia nor any of its traditional allies. They had spent their time inside the United States gathering intelligence, storing weapons and securing support for the one day when war would come. If asked and should they have been honest, none would have thought that that day would come for them to put all of those plans into action. One of them got cold feet and had decided to approach the Americans. Should he have managed to do so, the impact would have been quite something. Alas, his controlling officer, who had met with him and briefed him ahead of the war on what was coming, had detected something wrong when delivering that news. He saw the rejection in his subordinate’s face and caught what he was sure was an immediate decision being made to act against this. He could have been wrong but a voice inside his head had told him something was very wrong. A purported Bulgarian national residing in Virginia had disappeared from the face of the earth hours later. His body would be discovered years later and the connection even then not made.
If things had gone the other way, if the controlling agent hadn’t smelled an immediate rat…
The Americans knew that these facilitating agents existed.
From the captives they had taken in the fights against the Spetsnaz, questioning brought forth mentions of people not either dead or in custody. Huge effort was expended in building a complete picture of all of the bits of information known. Intelligence agencies – most of the alphabet soup of organisations – worked to put this together. Despite instructions from above to cut it out, there remained much inter-agency rivalry while it was ongoing. Not everyone wanted to share their toys nor liked playing in the same sandbox as others. Still, the intelligence was put together to start identifying those GRU people missing. This was helped by the removal of so many peacetime restrictions on their operations. Attorney General Eric Holder once more protested to President Biden about some of the things done on this note but to no avail. Holder considered handing in his resignation yet opted to wait until the war was over – whenever that might be or at least wait until the New Year if the conflict hadn’t ended by that point – to resign. Other lower-ranking people in political and legal positions who were aware of what they considered gross violations of the Constitution when it came down to domestic intelligence & military activities did leave their posts either voluntarily or after being asked to. The president had legal cover for his actions in authorising what was done and proceeded with them.
In West Texas, an armed raid by JSOC personnel on a rural property when intelligence suggested that the sleeper agents behind the Tinker attack could be found there occurred. Over a hundred people were involved: military and civilian. A married couple caught claimed innocence at first. They were naturalised citizens, originally natives of Poland they said, and had no idea what this was all about. FBI forensic science investigators who’d picked up their trail first in Oklahoma and was all over the Texas property soon showed this to be nothing but a lie. They were as guilty as sin and there was evidence to prove it. In peacetime, if this couple were ordinary spies, there would have been a media circus and also courtroom legal drama. America was at war though. The pair of them weren’t held in Texas but instead got a free flight to Cuba. When in Guantanamo Bay, they could be questioned by means illegal to do inside the United States especially to people who had a claim (even one which was ultimately fraudulent) to be a legal citizen.
Then there were those GRU officers involved in the massacre of US Air Force personnel – and some from the RAF too – at Creech.
JSOC had already conducted an unsuccessful raid in the Greater Los Angeles area to locate the three facilitating agents who’d been involved in hitting drone operators in Nevada. Green Berets attached to Task Force Hunter had followed a trail to California which had shown much promise. They’d gone in quietly…
…without realising an unseen civilian had filmed them from an elevated view and uploaded the footage onto youtube. Admiral McRaven – someone being rather favoured by the Biden Administration – had been rather mad at that.
The trail hadn’t gone completely cold though. Once more, forensics had been key. Those being sought had been at the house in Chino Hills, it was just that they were not at home when an army of American special operations personnel arrived to pay a house call. Physical evidence was all over the property. It was incredibly difficult to get rid of DNA. Many criminals in jail had found that out to their cost. Other criminals had still gotten away with things in the face of DNA proof due to the irregularities of justice systems but those hunting the GRU in California weren’t looking to build a case that had to hold its own against some clever lawyer. The Russians had been there and Americans knew it.
The trail had gone cold but it wasn’t dead. A new breath of warm air was now blown into it during early September. Task Force Hunter returned to Los Angeles. They got a tip off from a concerned citizen which first went through the FBI and was then shared with the wider Intelligence Community after an initial bureaucratic hold-up. Squabbles still occurred among civilian spooks – the CIA (operating on American soil), the FBI and the NSA – and the military intelligence officers too which even someone like McRaven couldn’t overcome but there was something here to follow. The breadcrumbs let to another married couple with Eastern European roots and a houseguest of theirs also from that part of the world too. The use of identities claiming these people were from NATO countries was assumed by the Americans to be a ploy to cause investigators to hesitate for fear of upsetting wartime allies. Well… that wasn’t going to work here. Should these foreign visitors supposedly from Romania and Hungary be innocent, any problems on that note would be smoothed over by diplomats.
Anyway, the new intelligence led the Americans to a house in Torrance, south of Los Angeles. They were getting set up when, in two vehicles, the three ‘Eastern Europeans’ all left the house in a hurry. Something spooked them and they made a dash for it. Not ready and undermanned, the Americans didn’t open fire on them in the middle of the street during daytime. It was FBI people present and McRaven would afterwards relieve one of his military subordinates for not being on-scene right with the FBI at the time. As to those two vehicles, they went to the Del Amo Fashion Centre. This retail mall had once been made famous in an iconic film. It was full of civilians, more than had been on the street outside that house. The Eastern Europeans / GRU sleepers conducted a change of vehicles there and tried to flee. One of them didn’t make it. There was a call of ‘gun, gun, gun!’ when she turned around fast upon one of the FBI men. He got his weapon out long before Green Berets could pour out of their van. Two shots rang out. The woman dropped down dead. Civilian witnesses screamed and ran; others took out their mobile phones to record what was going on. If this woman had been an innocent foreign national, things might have gotten rather complicated… She wasn’t though. She’d been removing a sub-machine guns from an oversized handbag: if the FBI man hadn’t shot her, she would have sent dozens of bullets in every direction.
Killing the Russians wasn’t wanted. The desire was to capture them alive to interrogate them. Using vehicles and soon a helicopter, the two others were soon picked up using separate vehicles to get away from that mall. Whether the Russians knew the woman was dead, the Americans didn’t know. What they wanted to do was to trap them in a good location and force them to give up when they were faced with many men armed with guns. They weren’t Spetsnaz, they wouldn’t fight to the end.
It was near to the Port of Los Angeles at Long Beach where that happened. Alerted, Homeland Security agents shut off all access to the site as vehicles carrying Russian spies approached. Long Beach was a secure area due to wartime activity there including the recent shipping overseas of much of the California Army National Guard. No matter what was wanted with the intention of taking these suspected spies in for questioning, that wasn’t going to be done at such an important place. It was in San Pedro where the final act of this drama played out. Individually, two vehicles were stopped. One was forced off the road to crash into a cemetery wall and the other was stopped using stingers on the pavement to shred its tyres: the latter came to a stop in a car park outside a convenience store. In full combat gear, outnumbering their quarry significantly and surely outgunning them too, the Green Berets were all around both vehicles. The stunned and shocked drivers were dragged out. FBI officers and LAPD liaisons kept back while the suspected spies were searched, cuffed, hooded and then thrown into JSOC-operated vehicles. Once they were taken away, then further forensic work could be done.
Neither of these two spies played the game that their comrades in Texas had done. They told no lies about who they weren’t. Information was handed over to those who questioned them while first in California and then afterwards when they reached Cuba. Each thought too that their other comrade, the woman killed in that mall car park, was talking as well (the Americans fed that perception) and this helped get more information out of them.
The Russians caught in San Pedro spilled their guts.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
Posts: 7,608
Likes: 8,833
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:44:15 GMT
One Hundred and Eighty Three
American commanders were beginning to regret their bold decision to open up another front in the Caucuses. Tbilisi, still vengeful after the Georgian defeat back in 2008, had sent its forces into a meat grinder of prepared Russian defences several days ago. United States Marines and had gone in with them, along with Green Beret reservist units, and success had been met but at a far higher cost in terms of both men and material than had been anticipated.
The Russians’ 58th Army had gradually been forced to cede the occupied Georgian territory seized two years ago as US and Georgian troops pushed those Russians northwards away from Tbilisi.
B-52 bombers had aided in this effort while warplanes from Romanian and Bulgarian airfields had put their efforts into destroying Russian air defence batteries in the region. The airfields at Krasnodar and Krymsk were hit by the combined might of the US and Italian Air Forces, the former with their B-1Bs and F-15Es and the latter using Tornado strike aircraft specially outfitted for defence suppression duties. Russian airpower over the Caucuses was effectively neutralised by the continuation or air operations against their bases, as well as against supply hubs for fuel and weaponry, which left those aircraft that were able to take off with little in the way of advanced missiles.
Even so, casualties on the ground were exceedingly heavy as the Americans and Georgians pushed onwards. American officers began to wonder if those US troops that had gone to Syria to support the Israeli invasion could have been better utilised in Georgia, but it was too late for that now. One thing that did improve the Americans morale was the arrival of the reactivated 194th Armored Brigade Combat Team along with the 197th Infantry Brigade Combat Team.
Those two formations had been active as training units for armoured and infantry officers and enlisted personnel up until several weeks ago. Now, their slots had been filled out by a mixture of personnel, which included training staff, troops brought back into service who had left the US Army within the past twenty-four months and who did not need retraining, recruits from the two armour and infantry schools who had seen their training advanced as a result of the outbreak of World War III, and reservist personnel who had been assigned to the two brigades as they were called up.
For command and control purposes, a new divisional headquarters was stood up to command the US Army’s two brigade combat teams’ in Georgia; the 9th Infantry Division.
The 9th Infantry Division, alongside the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the 509th Airborne Combat Team (men plucked from the US Army’s airborne & Ranger schools) and the 20th Special Forces Group found itself designated as II Corps. A small formation numbering fewer than thirty thousand men, II Corps made a renewed offensive effort against the 58th Army.
SS-26 Iskander missiles further delayed the American resupply efforts by targeting the major Georgian airports and airbases being used as supply hubs. It took the better part of a week for the reorganisation efforts to occur, but once they did the results were noticeable.
With NATO air superiority all but total, the Russians could only utilise a small number of Mi-24 & Mi-28 attack helicopters, which themselves were quickly shot down by American and Romanian fighter aircraft after making several attack runs against the Americans.
The ground offensive carried on as the hastily-formed II Corps took over from the Georgian Army. Armed with main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, the 9th Division and the Marines pushed up along the coast and down the major highways which linked the mountain passes to Tbilisi, drawing the Russian occupiers away from the centre of the country before crossing into the two rogue provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Tskhinvali, the capital of the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia, became the target of the untested 509th Combat Team. Using helicopters, a mixture of American Black Hawks and Georgian Hueys and Mi-8s, the Americans along with Georgian Special Forces operatives hit the city in a daring air assault, against resistance from pro-Russian militia units equipped with small-arms and a number of older BTR fighting vehicles and even some T-62 tanks supplied by Moscow.
Tskhinvali fell over the course of a two day engagement which saw the city devastated. The fortunes of II Corps and the Georgian Army had changed dramatically after the Americans had reorganised their forces with the ad hoc corps and divisional commands.
One Hundred and Eighty–Four
The FSB hadn’t been onto the espionage being committed out of the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow for very long. While pursuing another angle, they’d caught wind of one of the cut-outs employed by the French DGSE to exchange messages and information with the general assigned as military attaché there. There was serious consideration given to ‘disappearing’ him once discovered. However, the case had been brought to Director Bortnikov and he had decided to have efforts made to feed false information to the West down that chain instead. Efforts were underway as to figure out how to do this when Bortnikov then had a change of heart and decided to send true information out. He was making his play: one to end the war which he saw as lost. As challenging was the case with interfering in the French intelligence operation in a negative way, it was the same with trying to do so in a positive way. Breadcrumbs were laid for the general to pick up. He steadfastly refused to do so! The frustration was galling. This wasn’t just the case for Bortnikov but his subordinates too, men he deceived by telling them what was going out was false. At one point, Bortnikov almost gave up due to how complicated this all was. He had his people stick at it though and, finally, the spy unwillingly cooperated. Bortnikov was reported positive news. Those working for him were pleased to please their boss and told him that the NATO war effort would suffer gravely from what they passed on.
Ah… no that wasn’t the case at all. Things would be entirely the opposite instead.
Given the information on the Russian Army’s upcoming surprise counteroffensive, the Ukrainian general sat on the information. He did nothing with it. It was gold-plated intelligence that only a dummy wouldn’t understand. So why didn’t he pass the information along? Neither Bortnikov nor his FSB people knew. They could only suspect that he was being extremely cautious. They had no idea that the actual matter was his own internal conflict over how to act for the fate of his own country: the FSB was only thinking narrowly on this, unable to read the Ukrainian’s mind to understand the complexities of his emotions and loyalties. He did act in the end though. He made contact with his handler through the chain of cut-outs including the man under FSB control. This allowed a quick confirmation that what had been passed to the general was the same as what was being sent to the West too. Bortnikov’s fears there of some sort of double-cross or anything untoward were misplaced. The Ukrainian played his role and the secrets of Operation Volk were passed to NATO.
Bortnikov waited for the outcome now that things had moved beyond his immediate control.
The French shared the information with their allies. There was the usual sceptical response from some in certain agencies – it was the nature of the game – though the DGSE had been one of the most successful during the war in getting accurate intelligence that was useful for NATO. Now some might argue there that the Russians were playing the long game there, a real maskirovka indeed, but what was delivered from their agent (his details remained a closely-guarded French secret: the Americans and the British were playing a ‘friendly’ game in trying to identify himself) was backed up by evidence pretty quickly.
The internal manoeuvres within the Ukraine by their army, especially the Eighth & Thirteenth Army Corps in the western half of their nation, matched what the DGSE had obtained about this being used as a cover to allow for Russian forces – using similar equipment and structure – to enter the area under the apparent guise of being Ukrainian Army units. The road and rail links on the Ukrainian-Russian border had strange activity when observed from above. NATO already knew that there had been significant troop movements from both the Far East and the North Caucasus with two field armies absent from each region and not having shown up elsewhere. If this was a trick, to get NATO to do something that would somehow benefit the Russian war effort, it was one which didn’t make sense.
What Bortnikov had sent to NATO was the broad outlines of the Russian attack using their Thirty–Fifth & Forty–Ninth Armies from out of the northwest of the Ukraine into the southwest of Belarus. This including the logistical effort of the planned rapid deployment into & through the Ukraine as well as the actual offensive concept and objectives. There was an ORBAT and a timescale too: the timescale included the exact date and time of the attack. It was quite the military intelligence bonanza. They were informed what the Russian Army was about to do, when & where and with what end goal foreseen. It provided too opportunities to prove that this was also to occur when detailing the deployment schedules of the movement through the Ukraine of those two armies before they reached Belarus and tried to hit NATO’s armies on the rear flank. To put it simply, NATO would be able to see those armies moving before they went into attack and know what they were doing whereas if this information was false, there would be no deployment.
French President Sarkozy had the intelligence on this Volk given to fellow heads of government and the NATO senior command structure as well as the DGSE’s counterparts from America, Britain and Germany. He believed in the intelligence himself and didn’t want to sit on it while the time ticked away towards a sudden Russian strike that would imperil the war effort underway. SACEUR and the NATO Military Council discussed it as well as those fellow national leaders of his.
There was a lot of heated discussion on what to do. Much of this concerned what to do about the Russian usage of Ukrainian territory to strike against NATO forces, which was about to be done with Ukrainian cooperation. The disputes on the course of action to take were multi-faceted though could be summarised as opposing positions on whether to act to force the Ukraine to not allow this to happen or to let the Russians roll forward into the waiting guns of NATO’s armies and air power. Both approaches had those who favoured them and those who were opposed to them.
NATO wouldn’t have long to prepare for the Russian attack and it would cost NATO lives if allowed to take place. However, this would be a fight against significant numbers of Russian troops where NATO knew that were going to be. The two armies, if not sent through the Ukraine, were certain to if not go that way then fast appear in Belarus regardless. This was foreseen as something that would see an even greater number of lives lost there. The intelligence that the DGSE had obtained stated that in Kiev, President Yanukovych was going to play the ‘we didn’t know’ game afterwards. This had occurred before – though on a smaller scale – as the Russians had made use of the Ukraine and its territory for its war efforts. It was quite conceivable that when approached, Kiev would deny knowledge of any incoming attack at all. Did NATO want to force a war with the Ukraine by launching pre-emptive strikes? It was believed that Yanukovych didn’t desire such a fight that though had his military forces on-alert since the war had started. NATO was in a military position after a month’s worth of mobilisation through war to take on and defeat the Ukraine (not invading the country though) yet there was no mood for that in NATO either. Air and missile strikes, warning shots against the Ukraine or pre-deployment targeting of the transport infrastructure, could bring about a big and costly conflict with the Ukraine. There was the issue of causing Russia another shattering defeat too. They were staking everything on their Volk operation: risking so much for one big prize. Smashing the attack on the battlefield, rather than stopping it from happening through other means, was something that several NATO political and military figures wanted to see done.
A decision was eventually taken to let the Russians come. If they wanted their fight, they could have it. NATO would ambush them. Last minute objections by some important voices about having to explain later down the line why NATO not let only let the Ukraine get away with their ‘we didn’t see anything’ line but also the resulting casualties that NATO was bound to suffer were pushed aside. Biden, Cameron, Markel and Sarkozy all went for it in the end. General Petraeus agreed with them though maintained his request that once it started, tactical air strikes be made into the Ukraine exclusively targeted against Russian forces using Ukrainian transport links with the aim of minimalizing Ukrainian casualties. The politicians were still considering allowing that.
In Krakow, General Mattis had been party to the intelligence though not the decision-making. The commander of CJTF–East hadn’t been sitting twiddling his thumbs while the politicians hemmed and hawed over how to act. With permission from SACEUR, Mattis had taken steps to ‘ensure the safety of his command’ in light of the French intelligence on Russia’s Volk. He was told not to give the game away to Russian intelligence that NATO had wind of what was coming while doing so though Petraeus gave him wide latitude in doing what Mattis deemed necessary. Mattis favoured meeting the Russians on the Ukrainian-Belorussian border with everything NATO had to offer. He wanted to get his forces ready for the biggest of ambushes possible. Moving the troops to do that straight away was something that he couldn’t yet do at once though and he had to wait. That didn’t stop him having his operations staff make all the preparations. There was a slowdown – not a stoppage – of the advance on Minsk as Mattis prepared to swing the US V Corps to face southwards. Recent planned transfers of fresh units from the rear-area tasked German-Dutch I Corps to the V Corps to aid them in their final drive on Minsk were temporarily halted too. There were two Russian field armies, the intelligence he saw showed, each aiming to make two attacks and he wanted to meet each one head-on with separate corps commands for the purposes of battlefield coordination.
As to that ensuring of the safety of his command, Mattis did move some troops around: just not large units yet. One of the Italian brigades as part of their division fighting in southwestern Belarus (Italian partial neutrality seemed like something so far ago now after all the blood they’d shed in hard fighting) due to enter the fight against recently-arrived Russian Airborne Troops around Kobryń was kept back. The US 11th Cav’ was on the border over which the Russians were soon to cross and new orders went to them to have them prepared for what was coming. That unit was one which Mattis was certain could handle the fight coming their way but more than that, the regimental commander was astute enough to understand how to do that without giving the game away. At his headquarters when SACEUR sent those orders to Mattis, was the British Defence Secretary. Davis, on a visit to CJTF–East now cut short and due to rush off to Brussels, suggested adding a British contribution. The majority of British forces were fighting in the Baltic States with the Allied I & US XVIII Airborne Corps but there were a few elements with the German-Dutch I Corps including a battalion of experienced light infantry. 3 PARA had fought in Copenhagen and been bloodied there. Detached form its parent brigade post-Denmark, it had received casualty replacements and been used under Mattis’ command for a couple of selective missions in engaging Russian hold-outs scattered across Poland. They were currently unengaged and Davis wanted them to play a role in turning back Volk. Mattis agreed to this political interference: he didn’t get the job he currently had due to ignorance of inter-alliance politics. As to whether 3 PARA would ultimately welcome such a politically-based mission when they were in the way of the Russian Army, that was a different matter: they were a combat unit and would fight alongside allies in a vital role within an upcoming mission.
When the French got ahold of that ORBAT for the forces assigned to the Volk mission as it was passed to Mattis, one of his early comments had been that ‘we US Marines have more men!’.
This was true. The Russian Army had put together an impressive force for its counterattack but it wasn’t a numerically huge force overall. They had two armies, each with the main combat component being a pair of heavy divisions. In comparison, the field armies that they’d fought with when invading the Baltic States and Poland had each started the war with twice, even three times as much available sub-units. The prospect of two fresh armies had impressed upon the urgency of the situation to NATO’s leaders rather strongly and while Mattis didn’t discount nor disregard these Russian Army men, there weren’t that many of them. This was all that they had to use: just four divisions. That was all that was left of what could be sent to the fight: two pairs of heavy divisions. They had nothing more! Mattis was soon to receive the re-established US VII Corps which was on its way to Eastern Europe though still a few weeks away from being ready to see action. That force consisted of a trio of Army National Guard divisions and despite the difference in numbers of divisions when counting headquarters units, there were more men overall with the incoming VII Corps than there were the Russian Thirty–Fifth & Forty–Ninth Armies… and the United States too had a lot more national guard divisions going elsewhere in the world to fight too.
Four divisions, coming where and when he knew they would be, weren’t going to turn the tide of the war in Belarus. This was especially true once Mattis would unleash his ground forces on them plus thrown in more air power than the Russians could ever imagine coming their way!
As ready as he could be, Mattis and his CJTF–East had to wait though.
On the afternoon of September 7th, the two Russian armies crossed into the Ukraine from western Russia. Ukrainian Army manoeuvres with their heavy forces (complete with overt signal intelligence waiting for NATO to monitor) took place at the same time. There were a lot of Soviet-era military vehicles shuffling about. While not supposed to look innocent, the Ukrainians were meant to look unthreatening to NATO’s war effort inside neighbouring Belarus. The Russians disguised themselves as Ukrainians as they made their westwards deployment through the rest of the day and then through the night too.
Before dawn the next morning, they attacked into Belarus. Volk was underway: the wolf was let loose.
The Russians went straight into the waiting guns of NATO’s alerted and prepared forces.
End of Part Eight
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:46:03 GMT
Part Nine
One Hundred and Eighty Five
On the 8th of September, the dawn chorus was replaced by the sound of tank engines roaring into life. Nearly five hundred T-72s, T-80s, & T-90s began rolling northwards from their excellently-concealed pre-attack positions on the northernmost tips of the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Today was the day that Russian would smash the invading NATO armies that would otherwise be bound for Moscow, the Russian commander had told his men earlier in the day. The 49th Army, a fresh unit that had yet to be bloodied in combat with the Coalition, was sent careering towards Allied lines in what would become known as the greatest tank battle in the history of warfare. Kursk and El Alamein would have argued against this designation, but the die had been cast.
Unseen by Russian officers on the ground, over four hundred NATO warplanes circled to the north and west, awaiting the onslaught. Amongst them were American B-52s, AC-130s, F-15Es and A-10s, along with British Tornados and Harriers, German Tornados, Italian Typhoons, and F-16s from Belgium, Denmark, Holland and Poland. Some in NATO’s complex but effective command structure argued that airstrikes should begin immediately against the Russian advance. Both Mattis and Petraeus, however, agreed that the airstrikes should be postponed until the Russians hit the two elite NATO divisions waiting for them.
The US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division and the French Division Rapiere had over thirty thousand men and hundreds of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles of their own dug into well-prepared defensive positions. Those tanks and fighting vehicles were positioned beneath the cover of trees and between buildings as the first leaves of autumn began to flutter to the ground. Infantry teams with Javelin missiles waited nervously in their foxholes, preparing for what was coming.
This should have been the offensive that turned the war back in Russia’s favour. If things had gone to plan, the majority of the V Corps would have been cut off and forced to surrender. With nearly a hundred thousand Allied troops being marched to POW cages, Moscow would have been able to negotiate a successful peace treaty, perhaps sacrificing Belarus in the process of doing so…But alas, the first casualty of the Battle of Mazyr was Operation Volk.
The Russians made it successfully past the northern reaches of the Pripyat River, headed straight for that Belarusian town in a gigantic wall of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and armoured personnel carriers. Their artillery units waited behind them, prepared to engage NATO units which were thought to be many miles further north than they actually were. Had the Ukrainian spy not compromised Operation Volk, perhaps it might have worked.
The Battle of Mazyr began in earnest.
Gunners crouched into the metallic cocoons of M1A2-SEP and AMX Leclerc main battle tanks sighted their oblivious targets and opened fire. Javelin missile teams and TOW gunners manning Bradley fighting vehicles engaged the Russian tans as they passed into range. The lead elements of two Russian divisions, the 19th and 20th Guards Motorised Rifle Divisions ran into the wall of missiles and shells. Dozens of tanks died in the maelstrom of fire. Hundreds more came charging forwards. The Russians began to counter the attack, firing back at Western vehicles with great effect. Dozens more tanks, American and French alike, were destroyed. Crews on both sides burned as ammunition and fuel storage units exploded.
NATO’s massive aerial task force went into action. Green Beret Alpha Teams on the ground began targeting mobile Russian SAM systems – the 49th Army had many of these – with their own anti-vehicle weapons systems. Operating at tremendous risk to themselves, the commandos did an excellent job in destroying many guns and missile systems.
Those that remained were targeted ruthlessly by F-16s, Tornados, and Harriers often flying only a few feet above the treetops. NATO artillery units, wielding both 155mm guns and MLRS launchers began to engage as the defence suppression weapons went into action. Missiles, shells, Rockets and bombs rained down from above onto the Russians, with those American A-10s and F-15Es releasing their weapons systems with immediate and devastating effect.
Back on the ground, tankers killed tankers in numbers unseen for generations.
The Russians closed time and time again with their vehicles, killing dozens of Allied tracks only to find themselves engaged by yet more hidden Abrams or Leclerc vehicles. This battlefield was no place for infantrymen, even those with armoured vehicles to protect them.
The vulnerable American Bradley’s and French VBCIs were destroyed by the dozen as the day wore on, and likewise were their Russian counterparts, the BMPs and BTRs. Soldiers hidden in foxholes were in some cases simply driven over by enemy armour. The Russians were slow in getting their artillery and the attack helicopters made available to them into battle, but those two pieces of equipment performed their task almost as well as their NATO counterparts.
Mi-24s soared over the battlefield, flying so low that the NATO warplanes above often failed to detect them. They killed Allied troops and destroyed vehicles with AT-6 missiles and unguided rockets before being driven off by American Avenger missile systems and troops with MIM-92 Stingers. Russian artillery and MLRS units showered the NATO positions with warheads before being targeted for destruction by Allied airpower.
By midday it was clear to the Allies that this fight was going to see a victory, just as planned. The 1st Cavalry Division and Division Rapiere drove southwards, emerging from their foxholes and hidden positions, with Apache gunships overhead destroying Russian reconnaissance vehicles. B-52 bombers unleashed their thousands of Mark-82 bombs, with almost two dozen of these aircraft taking part in the Battle of Mazyr. A curtain of flames rushed through Russian forces as they began to fall back. The French Division Rapiere, bloodied but unbowed, sent its dismounted infantrymen to clear the forests south of Mazyr of Russian infantry, with the 6th Light Armored Brigade taking the lead (and the brunt of the casualties) in that fighting.
This manoeuvre saw the P-36 & P-31 Highways opened up to NATO forces. The French armoured forces went down the latter of those roadways, while the 1st Cavalry Division took the P-36, the more westerly route. The Americans, meeting resistance every step of the way but never once allowing it to halt them stormed up the highway led by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Brigade Combat Team. Abrams tanks and Bradley IFVs decimated the ranks of the opposing 19th Mechanised Rifle Division albeit at a great cost.
Division Rapiere similarly made excellent progress up the P-31 before swing towards the Pripyat River. Here, the 20th Motor Rifle Division, refusing to do what V Corps wanted by withdrawing north-west into a pocket, instead died a glorious and loud but ultimately futile death. Nearly all of its T-72s and BMP-2s were destroyed by the French armour and by NATO airpower above them. This didn’t come for free to Division Rapiere, however, with men dying from gunfire and shrapnel in the chaos.
The Battle of Mazyr culminated as the French swung westwards and the Americans went east, with the two divisions meeting at Slovchenko, a town so far to the south that it might as well have been Ukraine. Trapped between Mazyr, the Pripyat River, and Slovchenko was the 19th Motorised Rifle Division and what was left of the 56th Guards Airborne Brigade. It could have ended there with NATO waiting for the Russians to surrender…
…but it didn’t.
The B-52s appeared again, unleashing their Mark-82s after returning to the United Kingdom to rearm. Pummelled time and time again from the air and totally cut off from resupply, Russian morale threatened to crack. Then it did, with junior officers and enlisted personnel beginning to try to surrender. Shooting incidents took place as senior officers tried to keep control over their men, and then in the chaos, American and French tankers appeared on the horizon. What was left of the 49th Army put up something of a fight despite the anarchy unfolding within its ranks, but no matter what they did it was not enough.
The Battle of Mazyr ended just before midnight on the day it had begun, and with it, all hope for Russia died. On September 8th, 2010, NATO effectively won the Third World War.
One Hundred and Eighty–Six
While different in the skies, on the ground when dealing with the right wing of the Russian ‘surprise’ offensive it had only been the Americans and the French involved. It was remarkably different when NATO addressed the left wing of the advance from out of the supposedly neutral Ukraine into Belarus by another field army. The Thirty–Fifth Army, with troops from the Russian Far East, was faced with aircraft from many air forces operating in skies which they completely dominated, and on the battlefield below there was a wide mix of different nationalities who engaged them too.
Combat forces from a total of eight different NATO countries met them inside southwestern Belarus; other countries had troops which remained back in Poland that didn’t make it to the battle in time and thus it could easily have been a dozen nations involved. Fighting off the Thirty–Fifth Army was a mixed force of twice the strength of the attacking Russians. They didn’t necessarily dig-in completely to establish fixed defensive positions though there was some of that at certain points. It was more of a case of a mobile battle being fought. General Mattis’ CJTF–East ordered selective units coming up from their long-term defensive mission on the Ukraine’s borders with Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – leaving others in-place – to join with some of the German-Dutch I Corps. That headquarters took control of the battle. The Americans provided the most in terms of numbers (a plurality, not a majority) with the Germans not far behind them. The Czechs, the Hungarians, the Italians, the Slovaks, the Slovenes and even the British had a contribution as well. They were all out to stop Operation Volk from being successful.
Those British troops, 3 PARA, was located just back from the Ukrainian-Belorussian border along with the US Army’s 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment when the two Russian field armies came over at dawn on September 8th. Much of the 11th Cav’ was further east, out ahead of the US V Corps, though part of it was in the German-Dutch I Corps sector along with those British Paras.
Russian tanks, armoured vehicles and thousands of troops moved over the border and those on the northern side of that dividing line were engaged in fighting them immediately. Bigger battles were to come, but there were these short and lethal clashes first. The elements of the training unit which had come from the Californian desert and those British soldiers who’d previously fought a devil of a fight in Copenhagen took part in ambushes to break up lead units. They had been told the exact routes which the Russians would take and fired off weapons against them to break up and disrupt the movement. Yet, there was silence from others alongside them as they didn’t conduct any ambushes but rather provided on the ground scouting to confirm what was already known. Not everyone knew where the super-secret intelligence on Russian intentions had come from nor was willing to fully trust it.
As the border fights raged, to slow down the pair of Russian motor rifle divisions entering Belarus, the German-Dutch I Corps started moving in its heavier forces. Lt.–General van Loon, a Royal Netherlands Army officer not currently commanding any of his fellow Dutchmen (Mattis and Petraeus had both backed his continued appointment despite some objectives from back in the Pentagon who wanted to put a US Army officer in charge), had his heavy units roll over the River Bug as they crossed from Poland into Belarus. Three divisions and three independent brigades went over. There was a brigade of Italians already moving in behind the 11th Cav’ & 3 PARA but this force dispatched by van Loon was sent to win the fight. They would be a surprise for the Russians indeed.
The Thirty–Fifth Army headed for Brest.
Retaking the city on the Belorussian side of the Bug wasn’t their objective but instead they were to get over the river and enter Poland near to it. There were all of those pontoon bridges which NATO had put up to cross the Bug to supply their V Corps fighting inside Belarus. That was what the 81st Guards & 270th Motor Rifle Divisions was here to do… unaware that NATO knew all about that and was using them themselves not for a mass of supply trucks but instead a mass of armour. Inside Belarus, the Russians took losses from fire from on the ground and from the skies. They drove onwards into the face of this. Losses mounted but they weren’t enough to stall the advance. One of the 81st Guards’ regiments was tasked to protect the flank to the north as everyone else swung away to the west. There was an unconnected fight already underway around Kobryń where the Italians were known to be fighting Russian Airborne Troops sent in ahead of Volk to provide a distraction effort. The whole of the Italian division was believed to be there. It wasn’t. Their Cavalry Brigade Pozzuolo del Friuli was in action as it linked up with retreating Americans and Britons. Opening fire from artillery was made first and then the Italians brought their Centauro tank destroyers into play. Russian infantry carriers supported by a battalion of tanks – BMP-2s and T-72s – took murderous fire from those Italian armoured vehicles. The Italian ambush caused the Russian regiment to halt. If it had been able to carry on regardless, charging head-on into that accurate fire, the Russians might have given the Italians real trouble but they stopped under higher orders as their parent division. No one knew what was going on. Who was firing on them? Why were those Italians there and not where they were supposed to be? Had the cat been let out of the bag early? As those questions were being asked, in came a mass of NATO air power.
V Corps received more of support from above in unleashing a torrent of destruction upon their opponents yet that didn’t mean that the German-Dutch I Corps were left out. NATO jets flew in and bombed the Russians repeatedly. A wide area of the Belorussian countryside was the target for all of this, nowhere near to any major population center. SAMs and anti-aircraft shells were lofted skywards, sometimes getting hits in, but what the Thirty–Fifth Army needed was aircraft of their own. There weren’t any that could reach the fight in the face of NATO control of the skies for hundreds of miles around. Certain Russian units pushed onwards through all of this. Their commanders refused to sit still and die. If they closed with enemy forces, NATO would ease off for fear of friendly fire. Others didn’t move though. It didn’t matter what the Russians did. NATO ground forces weren’t yet here and in the meantime they had a free-fire zone where static or moving opponents were blasted to bits regardless of what they were doing.
By midday, NATO got its many heavy units into the fight.
Not everything went as planned with van Loon’s counterattack. Interference on the border and then the massive series of air strikes caused the Russians to differ from their pre-attack detailed plans, the ones which had been passed to NATO via French intelligence activities as the machinations of the FSB director. Some of the fighting erupted earlier than foreseen with the Russians out of place. This was especially true with elements of the 270th Motor Rifle who were closer to the Bug than believed. Czech and German troops with the 13th Panzergrenadier Division (an untested unit which had spent a month in Hungary and Slovakia) met them in battle. Despite the tactical surprise, these NATO troops emerged victorious from their meeting engagements. It slowed them down though and losses were taken. With the majority of the rest of the German-Dutch I Corps, this wasn’t the case. Sent in first were the US 3rd Infantry & German 10th Panzer Divisions (the latter including a brigade of Slovenes). Each of these formations had fought before in Poland, taking major losses there in stopping the first Russian invasion of their ally. Replacements had been absorbed and the divisions brought back up to strength. This didn’t mean they were what they once were though.
Yet the opponents which they all faced were seeing war for the first time. This wasn’t a battle which either Russian division nor their thousands of men should ever have been in. They were though. War came to them in the Belorussian countryside and it was horrible. NATO had larger forces and thorough air cover. The Americans, Czechs, Germans and Slovenes tore into them. It was a fight as big as the one taking place over at Mazyr which the V Corps was in. Moreover, van Loon eventually sent more of his troops into the fight. The main attack with his three divisions was joined by that trio of brigades which had come over afterwards from Poland too. The Slovakian 2nd Mechanised Brigade linked up with the Italians to keep the Russians from attempting an escape to the north. A secondary move to keep the Thirty–Fifth Army where they were and unable to get away was made along the Ukrainian-Belorussian border. Staying just on the northern side of the border line, the US 116th Cavalry Brigade (national guardsmen who had long been in Poland on the Ukrainian border) was followed by the Hungarian 25th Infantry Brigade. They shot up anyone in their way that had crossed over and while doing so mainly engaged rear area units behind the combat troops being taken apart by the rest of the German-Dutch I Corps. Some fire, from Russian units, not Ukrainians, came across the dividing line. It was returned though with care taken to engage only Russian attackers. This brought up serious issues over what to do with the Russians left back over in the Ukraine who hadn’t made it across. The Americans and Hungarians set about blocking the border yet would remain under intermittent fire for a long time after the main battle happening behind them ceased.
The Thirty–Fifth Army was trapped.
No all-round defence was able to take place and there were columns of American and German tanks which had driven hard forward to make deep penetrations. By the time night fell, much of the 270th Motor Rifle ceased to exist as a fighting force and the 81st Guards wasn’t in a much better state. The closeness between friendly and enemy forces on the battlefield did effect NATO air operations but not as much as the Russians would have hoped. They could still bring it into play and use it just as effectively in the darkness of night as well as they had in daytime. The field army’s commander was dead and so too was one of his divisional commanders. NATO were breaking the Russians up into smaller pieces as penetrating units linked up with others.
Another field army was lost. With the Thirty–Fifth Army it wasn’t official until the following morning as this one didn’t die as fast as the Forty–Ninth Army did, but, in the end, that delay didn’t matter. Those troops were gone. Large-scale surrenders would take place and there were even shooting incidents where certain officers were shot by men who refused to keep fighting and just wanted to bring this hell to an end.
The Russian Army had other men in uniform. There were men fighting in Lithuania, elsewhere in Belarus, in the Caucasus Mountains and in Tajikistan. Small forces remained in the Russian Far East, looking seawards, and there were reservists already in-place in the Kola with ever-so-slow mobilisations occurring elsewhere ready to send them to the battlefields.
However, Russia was out of trained and well-equipped units to send into battle anymore. The cupboard was now officially bare after Volk’s failure. Unless those in Lithuania could escape, they were finished. Those others in Belarus had barely a few days fight left in them: the road to Moscow was open after that! Major issues with reserves failing to turn out and then the state of equipment pulled from storage meant that no hope could be put in them to stop NATO now doing what it wanted with its own armies. Those were armies which had taken serious losses but carried on fighting and also had incoming American reinforcements too.
In Moscow, far from the battlefields of Belarus, one senior figure celebrated. Arguably, Bortnikov was responsible for all of those deaths which had just occurred. He was certainly responsible for the shocking defeat which Volk turned out to be. He celebrated because now, finally, he would approach others and they would listen to him when he would explain that the war was lost. Well… that was what he hoped would happen anyway.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:47:40 GMT
One Hundred and Eighty Seven
NATO’s response to the Russian’s use of Ukrainian soil to mount the disastrous Operation Volk was swift but far from uncompromising. This was not the first time the Ukrainians had allowed Russian forces to cross their borders, and by now Brussels was growing frustrated.
A response was needed, but the Alliance wanted to keep Ukraine out of the war and avoid fighting on yet another front, especially with the end now in sight in Belarus.
Political games played in Brussels meant that there was a varying degree of enthusiasm regarding the large-scale use of force against Kiev. The government there had no interest in getting involved in what it saw as a losing fight, and yet, it also shared a large border with Russia and was, obviously, well within range of potential ‘nuclear persuasion’ should Putin become desperate enough to take that course of action.
Whatever happened, Kiev was in an awkward position with no way to avoid a NATO counterstrike and little in the way of defences against Russia if it chose to side with NATO and shut down those Russian supply lines running through Ukrainian soil.
Nervously, members of the Ukrainian government and military awaited the inevitable. It came on the night of September 9th, in the form of the US Air Force’s heavy and medium strike aircraft. Operation Rolling Storm involved B-1B bombers with the 28th Bomb Squadron, along with F-15Es from bases in southern England; those strike planes were escorted by F-15C Eagles, the air superiority variant of the F-15.
AGM-154 Joint Stand-Off Weapons or JSOWs, the same systems that had been used to obliterate a whole armoured division of the Russian Army, again struck Russian forces. Launched from the Lancer bombers over Belarusian airspace, the two-dozen JSOWs obliterated Russian air defence batteries – SA-15 Tors mainly – and hit the few surviving command centres operated by the Russians before the B-1s withdrew.
Ukrainian air defences saw these JSOWs entering their airspace but nothing could be done to stop them. Two AGM-154s passed the Russian supply routes…
…Bound straight for Kiev. Those two excellently-targeted (the US Air Force attaché at the embassy in Kiev had gotten the correct targeting information back to the Pentagon) missiles obliterated the Ukrainian Defence Ministry building as a show of force.
Dozens of Ukrainians, civil servants and military aids alike, died with the Defence Ministry as it collapsed to the ground. This part of the operation was not supported by many European governments, including, for the first time since the outbreak of World War III, the governments of Britain and France. It was seen as an unnecessary escalation with major risks of drawing Ukraine into the war.
With the air defences destroyed from a stand-off range, the Strike Eagle’s began to pummel those supply routes with JDAMs. Russian troops tried to seek shelter from the storm but found little protection in their slit trenches as death rained down from above.
AH-64D Apache gunships also took part, scouting out enemy trucks filled with supplies and destroying them with Hydra rockets. By the end of the first night of Operation Rolling Storm, Russia’s fragile southern logistical train had been shattered, with almost nothing left. The only Allied losses had been a pair of Apache gunships, with both Ukrainian air defences and Russian tactical anti-aircraft systems failing to bring down an F-15 or even one of the prized Lancer bombers.
The attacks rocked the Ukrainian government; they had not expected strikes of these proportions no matter what their crime had been. Ukraine had avoided joining the war on the side of Putin specifically to prevent attacks on its own soil but all hopes of doing so now died along with hundreds of Ukrainian servicemen and over a dozen civilians. Camera footage of a large fire roaring in Kiev quickly made its way onto social media.
The people of Ukraine were split on who was to blame. Many saw NATO as the aggressor here, but countless more saw this as being the fault of Russia’s recklessness and by default, the actions of their own government in Kiev.
One Hundred and Eighty–Eight
Only an utter fool would have believed that Russia hadn’t been betrayed.
Someone had purposely given away the secret which was Operation Volk and all of its component details too. No one in Moscow could see any other way that what had happened had without treason. NATO had known when and where the attack came, more than just knowing of its existence. The understood the strength of the forces involved and what they planned to do. They had enough time to marshal and then conceal a counterattack force to annihilate the Thirty–Fifth & Forty–Ninth Armies on the battlefields of Belarus. It could be argued that there was a chance that NATO had managed to intercept & then interpret signalling and maybe too they got lucky with their overhead reconnaissance. Maybe… However, even with that, that didn’t explain what had occurred on September 8th with everything that occurred.
No, someone had stabbed the Rodina in the back before then twisting the knife in too.
It was FSB Director Bortnikov who gave this impassioned summary to the Russian Security Council. He affirmed his intention to find out who that it was and personally see that they suffer for their foul treachery. Patrushev had been intending to give a similar speech himself and both General’s Makarov and Shlyakhturov had comments to give as well, which would have been even more dramatic. Alas, the traitor himself took all of the limelight. Bortnikov asked for permission from Putin to have the FSB lead the enquiry into finding the source of the treason and delivering punishment. This stirred comment from others, Shlyakhturov especially. The GRU headed wanted to do this himself: it was the responsibility of his organisation to identity any military intelligence leak. He found himself turned on by several figures – rivals uniting – where it was said that the responsibility of the GRU had been to stop leaks. They’d failed in this, General Gerasimov declared, and why should they now be charged with uncovering their own mistake?
The bickering had become all too common among meetings of the group though things went rather far in the aftermath of the failure of Volk. No one present was willing to see this ‘moved past’. A resolution was sought when the traitor that Bortnikov declared there was should face extreme punishment. It took some time for the council’s head Patrushev to bring some order and stop the open accusations of failure & incompetence. Once it finally stopped, Putin addressed them all. He chastised several figures for what had been said and then addressed the matter at hand. He turned the responsibility for finding the leak over to the FSB, stripping away that task from the GRU.
Poker-faced Bortnikov showed no sign of the inner relief he had.
What was to be done now, Putin asked them rhetorically. He had his top-tier ministers, his senior generals and his spymasters before him. At their last meeting, they had all agreed that launching Volk was going to win the war for Russia. The attack had failed – failed being an understatement of quite some magnitude – so what was next?
There wasn’t a rush to give an answer to this. There was silence instead.
Putin repeated his demand for the Security Council to provide a solution.
Patrushev suggested that the meeting be reconvened tomorrow. They should all meet again after going away to consider the matter. Putin didn’t look too impressed at this in the eyes of some of the others. He had seemingly perked up when his loyal ally spoke then appeared to be disappointed when there came only talk of delay. However, the president agreed to that. The foreign minister, Kozak, started to say something afterwards about working to sew disunity among NATO countries but without anything concrete there, Patrushev urged him to wait until tomorrow.
The usually so decisive – and proud of that – Security Council had demurred on even talking about making a decision on anything. The situation was unprecedented. The shock from what had just happened in Belarus had thrown (almost) them all out of sorts.
Much later that day, Bortnikov returned to the Kremlin to see Putin. The president was soon to leave the building for the evening – he didn’t sleep here due to NATO favouring bombing raids over Moscow in the dead of night – but he had time for the FSB spymaster. Putin wanted an update on how the progress was going in identifying who was responsible for the shocking leak of wartime secrets to NATO. Bortnikov feigned frustration at his agency’s efforts to not discover who was responsible but assured his president that in the hours since instructed to act, he had his people busy. It would be within the GRU where the traitor would be found, he said. The FSB was currently working on a list of who knew enough about Volk before then looking for who could have been talking to the West. He could offer no more at this early stage, he continued, but Putin could rest assured that the FSB would find the traitor in the end.
Then he asked for, and received permission to, speak candidly.
Bortnikov stated that he believed that now might be the time to see if there was a way to end the war. Putin told him to continue his line of thinking: keep speaking candidly. The response was that twice now, military moves had been made to bring the West to the negotiating table. The first attempt had come after Russia’s armies ceased their advance in Poland and a second was due to be done after Volk was meant to succeed. Clearly, there was no plan now to make that effort again but Bortnikov suggested that they do so. Despite the stunning victory achieved on the battlefield, NATO would be hurting just as bad as Russia in terms of casualties. All of those small countries involved would have taken grave losses like the larger ones. This was the right moment, he believed, to have another go rather than cancel plans to do so.
No.
Putin refused to do so. They would win this war and end it on Russia’s terms. He stated that he intended to allow the West to think they got better terms that they did but it would be Russia which would dictate what they were. Moreover, now wasn’t the time to make that effort. Russia had just lost a major battle and couldn’t now approach the West. There had to be another way to go about things, Putin ended the conversation & meeting by saying, and going on the knees to NATO wasn’t it.
Bortnikov had a further meeting afterwards, this time with those whom he had previously been having secret talks with. Gerasimov, Lebedev and Shoygu were there and this time Bortnikov brought Zubkov along as well. The defence minister, someone whom Gerasimov had worked with Makarov in the past to neuter the influence he should have had, was now brought into the conspiracy with the others. Bortnikov had smoothed over the Gerasimov-Zubkov issues before bringing the two men together. Blaming Makarov for all of that drama was one factor in his success in that; the other was making sure that the defence minister was more focused on his hatred for the GRU head that one of his senior generals. Bortnikov had convinced Zubkov – like he was trying to with Putin – that the leak that had seen the Russian Army suffer such a grave defeat was down to Shlyakhturov.
As they met in an FSB-secured location, NATO air attacks were being made against the Ukraine. They wouldn’t discover this until afterwards with aides of both Gerasimov and Zubkov unable to locate both men to inform them of this.
None of those whom the FSB Director met with knew what he had done in selling out Russia in the manner like he had done. Maybe he could have made Lebedev and Shoygu understand his reasoning… but Gerasimov nor Zubkov would have reacted strongly at once and wouldn’t be talked around no matter what. Bortnikov, eager to show them his own cleverness, had enough sense to keep Schum! He told them instead that he was looking forwards to uncovering the traitor and seeing them get their just deserts. This meeting wasn’t about that though. He told them about his meeting with Putin.
Throwing his hands up in despair, once more today giving an Oscar-winning performance, he told them that Putin had stonewalled him. That wasn’t true. Telling the truth, admitting that his attempts at winning him around like he said he would be able to do beforehand, wasn’t what Bortnikov would own up to. He had thought that he would be able to do that but had been remarkably wrong. Thus, he lied and stated that the president wouldn’t even allow him to broach the subject of seeking an end to this war now. That was what all these co-conspirators of his wanted: an end to the fighting, the death and the destruction. They all saw themselves as patriots and after Bortnikov’s ‘revelation’, now as the only sensible people in positions of power in Moscow.
Bortnikov continued his charade. He said that Putin wasn’t the same man as he had once been. He himself had believed that he had been the only man who could save Russia and that was why he stood with him to end the disastrous rule of Medvedev. It was why he had gone to him again today.
But… he was wrong. Putin could no longer lead effectively. Once more, the question was asked of Russia’s leaders (though this time to a far smaller audience) as to what do we do now?
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:49:14 GMT
One Hundred and Eighty Nine
In spite of all the blood that had been spilled in this war so far, a degree of animosity emerged between Western governments after Operation Volk was repulsed in what was already being hailed as the most important military engagement since Stalingrad. The first reason for this gradual breakdown was that virtually every European government had been opposed to the direct attack upon the Ukrainian capital city, Kiev, which had taken place last night with the use of AGM-154 glide bombs.
The Pentagon had felt the destruction of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry to be an appropriate retaliatory measure that would simultaneously punish Kiev for allowing Russian forces to use its territory and warn the Ukrainian government to go no further. In contrast, the European governments, including even the most hawkish leaders in Britain and France, felt the attack was not only risky and unnecessary but also of questionable legality.
Nobody was prepared to question the air attacks against Russian supply routes through the territory of the supposedly neutral Ukraine, but an attack on the capital city was a different matter. In Europe, even in the capitals of Poland and Norway, countries that had been ravaged by the war, there was no desire for vengeance against Ukraine in particular which would draw that country into the war and extent it for several more weeks as Allied forces were forced to occupy it.
The Kiev bombing was seen as a merely unnecessary act, one that risked a lot for relatively little true gain. The divide caused here was furthered by an American airstrike against Minsk which took place the same night. Nine B-52 bombers had pounded facilities such as highway junctions, railway stations, and government buildings with hundreds of unguided Mark .82 bombs and the civilian deathtoll was reported to be in the hundreds, perhaps thousands.
The Pentagon had justified the Arc Light mission as a preparatory bombardment for the ground assault on the Belarusian capital which was sure to be swift-in-coming. Many saw it as a political message showing exactly what US airpower was capable of. Either way saw yet more division in a NATO that should have been united by its immense victory in southern Belarus.
Thirdly, another contested issue was the belief that the war was effectively over.
Some governments - those in Berlin, Madrid and Rome in particular - saw the effective collapse of the Russian Army as the end. All NATO really needed to do, they argued, was either offer peace terms which would ensure the release of Latvian and Estonian soil from beneath the heel of the jackboot, or alternatively, send V Corps sweeping in from the south to liberate Latvia and Estonia while leaving Belarus to its fate under whatever remained of the Lukashenko regime.
The counter argument offered by the US, Britain, France and Poland was that Belarus needed to be liberated to ensure a buffer between Russia and Poland and that what remained of Russia's armies in the field in the Baltic States had to be eliminated in order to prevent a resurgent Russia from appearing a decade down the line.
Many of the less hawkish European leaders felt that enough blood had been spilt in World War III so far.
One Hundred and Ninety
The men serving with the 3rd Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment were issued with just over ninety minutes warning of what was coming their way. Hold until relieved, the orders came from above to ‘the Steelbacks’. The TA soldiers and officers with the 3 R ANGLIAN dug-in among hastily arranged defensive positions on the southern side of the Daugava River in the middle of Latvia. Aircraft whizzed through the skies and there were explosions on the horizon. Those came closer and closer to where the reservists from across the East of England were positioned. A lot of things went through the soldier’s minds, a lot of questions were asked. Why couldn’t they withdraw over the river was one of the most prominent of those questions. Their task was not to consider the bigger matters this morning though but rather fight instead. That they would have to do.
Russian tanks and armoured vehicles arrived. There was no massive pre-attack artillery barrage though some shells did fall among British lines. 3 R ANGLIAN took the first of its casualties before many of those steel beasts disgorged riflemen were among their lines. MILAN anti-tank missiles were fired, mortars were launched and machine guns opened up. A dismounted infantry unit, 3 R ANGLIAN had no real mobility of its own. The Russian attack was all over the place and they couldn’t respond effectively as a battalion to what occurred. There was no ability to plug the holes which were ripped open through their lines despite the furious defensive fire put up. Russian mounted firepower and then charges made by riflemen forced the column that they led through the British lines and to the river beyond.
In their wake, they left hundreds of dead British reservists with 3 R ANGLIAN along with many more wounded with no immediate help on the way for them.
Many of these part-time volunteer soldiers had seen conflict before, going to Iraq and Afghanistan, though the Steelbacks had never been to war as a full battalion before. They were ordinary people from across East Anglia, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Northamptonshire sent off to fight a different war. They’d meet violence while in Latvia but that came from terrorist actions by Russian-supported Militia. Today it was a completely different thing which destroyed their battalion and took their lives. Their losses would be felt among families and communities far and wide.
Elsewhere along the Daugava, further TA units as well as other troops assigned to the British 2nd Infantry Division were caught in the fire of Russia’s war machine as that river was reached. Instructions to hold until relieved were sent to them too. No relief came in time. The 15th Infantry Brigade had more TA soldiers from Yorkshire as well as a battalion of Canadian infantry from their Primary Reserve. There was too much damage done to and casualties caused within the 52nd Infantry Brigade where its TA units from England, Scotland and Wales serving within were literally driven over. Much of the third combat brigade – the 42nd Infantry Brigade – escaped the maelstrom of death and destruction that others suffered due to their inability to reach the fight in time: they were those meant to relieve the two other brigades. TA men riding in Scimitars and Spartan tracked armoured vehicles serving with the Queen’s Own Yeomanry went into battle though. Their orders had them attempt to shield the exposed infantry units from the incoming Russian armour spotted inbound. Some good efforts were made with kills made on enemy armoured vehicles but once the T-72 and T-80 tanks turned their fire on them back, the British were wiped out. The Queen’s Own Yeomanry, like many of the infantry battalions, would be completely destroyed as a fighting unit.
Meanwhile, the Russian Army was once more starting to cross the Daugava though this time going north rather than south.
It would be said afterwards that NATO took its eye off the ball in the Baltic States through September 10th when much of the UK 2nd Infantry & part of the US 7th Infantry Divisions were both hit as hard as they were. Too much focus was on celebrating the recent victory won in Belarus, disputing the course of the war that would come afterwards and also whether the Americans had done the right thing in making their limited air attacks on Kiev. Those detractors had a good point though that wasn’t completely fair. There was an understanding that the Russian Twentieth Guards Army was looking likely to escape from Lithuania by going over the Daugava through Latvia: that was what the US XVIII Airborne Corps had initially been sent to Latvia to stop. The Russians were being watched closely with there being the option in NATO’s eyes for them to make an ‘easy’ escape through Belarus or do things the ‘hard way’ and come over the Daugava. A lot of attention was being paid elsewhere though including the continued attempts by the US 82nd Airborne Division to take Riga due to political pressure within the alliance to liberate the Latvian capital. Overnight, making use of not just the darkness but also some clever deception efforts, the Twentieth Guards Army – well… what was left of it – broke north instead of east.
Far too late they were spotted, far too late to be really stopped before they reached the river. Both the 82nd Airborne and the UK-led 6th Airmobile Division were in the wrong position. While each would have suffered much in trying to stop the Russians, they probably could have achieved it. It fell on the lighter & less experienced units of the XVIII Corps though, those in the middle of the line along the Daugava. Both lighter divisions were on internal security duties and not in any way ready to be hit by what came their way. The other pair would have certainly been able to do far better. The Russians were retreating after all: they weren’t in the best of shapes. Yet they got out of Lithuania, into Latvia and started going over the Daugava.
NATO air power screaming in from all directions to hit the Russians who’d leapfrogged ahead overnight. Screening units had been left behind – the majority of them being Belorussians who were lied to about how they were being abandoned – to hold up the Allied I Corps as it liberated the majority of Lithuania along with completing the final stages of occupying Kaliningrad. Operation Baltic Arrow was going well there, just not here. Most of the Russians had gone charging northwards though. The Twentieth Guards Army was escaping and so left equipment and even supplies too. What was moving up to that river which ran across the width of Latvia and then over to it was hit and hit hard from above. There were some unfortunate instances of friendly fire where those NATO troops on the ground were hit by their own air support and also Latvian civilians were once more caught up in bombing raids too.
Nonetheless, the Russians were crossing the river. They even made use of many captured NATO bridges over the Daugava as well, those assembled by engineers and not blown up in time. Thousands of them, along with a significant armour presence, would make sure that if NATO wanted to take the rest of Latvia, and go up to Estonia as well, that was going to be extremely difficult for them to achieve now.
There was still much fighting near to and along the Daugava throughout the day: some Russian units didn’t make it across, the XVIII Corps had been split in two and the I Corps moved up as well. Elsewhere, the recriminations were already underway because this wasn’t supposed to have happened.
The British Government didn’t have any direct operational control over military units in the field overseas from the UK. There were many opt-outs which could – and had been already – be used for certain matters and there was too full knowledge of what was being done by whom when and where. Elements of the British Armed Forces deployed on NATO missions were under NATO control through an organised and wartime tested command structure. When deployed to Latvia, the 2nd Infantry Division came under the control of the XVIII Corps: in turn command responsibly went upwards to the US Seventh Army, CJTF–East and the SACEUR. If there had been the decision in London not to have their troops on the Daugava, then they wouldn’t have been there. It had been the decision taken by Cameron’s War Cabinet to send them there though and thus to an active war zone.
Throughout the day, reports arrived back in the UK of losses taken among British forces which had fought along the Daugava. Each time a new report arrived, the casualty figures rose higher and higher. British forces had fought costly land battles before in this war and there had been some significant losses of personnel at sea though this was rather different. First it was TA infantry and Yeomanry who were killed, wounded and missing before it was rear area support troops of the 2nd Division who were caught up in the disaster which was the Russian Twentieth Guards Army getting away. Those in London were unable to intervene in what happened there.
Aghast would be a good word to describe the reactions from them.
Only that morning, the War Cabinet – a committee formed from senior Cabinet ministers with officials and senior military officers assigned – had been discussing sending further British troops to Eastern Europe. There were plans afoot to deploy the 51st Infantry Brigade, a headquarters which had remained back in the UK overseeing security and training missions through Scotland. More TA troops plus also the British Army regulars who had fought in Transnistria were to be sent to Belarus, attached to the US V Corps there. This would be a reversal of the previous decision not to commit British forces in number in that country and instead keep them contained in other theatres of war for ease of logistics. The talking of making such a change was down to politics and the recent issue over the future direction of the war in Belarus where several NATO countries were growing apprehensive over continuing that when parts of the Baltics remained occupied. Cameron and his ministers were considering committing significantly to that war in Belarus – attaching the 51st Brigade to the French division fighting there seemed plausible – with TA troops when the Daugava Line was breached in the shocking way that it was. It could be said that they had relegated the fight in the Baltics to something secondary at the worst time possible to do that. Yet, as said, the fighting there on the ground in Latvia was a combined NATO matter.
A lot of anger in London was outwardly directed – they weren’t about to start blaming themselves – to the Americans. Lt.–General Helmick, the US Army officer in command of the XVIII Corps, would find that his name was mud among the British Government. Why had he not prepared his defences properly? Why had he not given more warning of what was coming? Why had he put British troops in the most exposed position? Not being able to talk to him directly, the rage coming from London on this went via a trans-Atlantic routing instead.
Major–General Shaw, the 2nd Infantry Division’s commander, was spoken to over the satellite link-up by Defence Secretary Davis before the end of the day too and he wasn’t in any favour among the War Cabinet either: blame the messenger that was. He gave another casualty count when it came to British troops who fought on the Daugava. The information which Shaw had was that close to three thousand were dead, a similar number were seriously injured and about six hundred were missing.
These were losses eventually going to have to be explained to the British public.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:50:52 GMT
One Hundred and Ninety One
The 'Disaster on the Daugava' as it was being coined had not dampened the spirits of NATO troops in Belarus. The Americans, French, and Poles were doing the bulk of the heavy lifting, advancing on Minsk with vigour.
The myriad of political issues now faced by the Coalition hadn't had a direct effect on V Corps, still enamoured by its victory against the Russians' failed Operation Volk offensive. All that was left in the way of V Corps was the scattered remnants of the 1st Guards Tank Army now fighting in regiments and battalions, along with a cluster of surviving Belarusian Army brigades and Lulashenko's internal security forces and hastily-raised militia.
The French Army's forces and the US 1st Cavalry Division held the southern flank of the corps' axis of advance, having thrown back the Russians' Thirty-Sixth Army. Those units prepared to hit Minsk from the south, spending the days following Operation Volk fighting their way through several townships and villages defended by spirited but poor-quality militiamen.
French forces moved down the M-5 Highway, with their commandos from 1RPIMA seizing Minsk National Airport, to the south-east of the city and thus becoming the first NATO unit to reach the Belarusian capital officially, which would cause a great deal of friendly rivalry with the Americans and Poles. Minsk was being encircled from the south as NATO began the effort to cut off the city.
Belarusian troops were dug in throughout, with an outer defensive belt stretching all the way around Minsk manned by the militia and by what was left of the Army. Although few tanks were present, the defenders were well-armed with a mixture of Russian-supplies ATGMs.
Meanwhile, to the west, an unofficial race had begun between the Polish 11th Cavalry Division and the US 1st Armored Division. The Americans were hell-bent on reaching Minsk first after the losses they had suffered in previous days when ordered to increase the speed of their advance.
However, the vengeful Poles were similarly driven. While the 1st Armored Division technically won the race to Minsk, the Americans would be dismayed to find out about the French Army’s capture of Minsk National Airport later on. With the city surrounded from the west and south-east, the Polish 11th Cavalry Division moved into position from the south, while American air cavalrymen with the 101st Airborne Division made probing attacks against the outer defensive ring, which had been set up all around the M-9 Highway, which stretched in a circle around Minsk.
No assault into Minsk was to take place until later on. For now, V Corps was ordered to hold off on the attack into the city. Lukashenko himself was known to be within, and NATO Special Forces units would be sent in to prevent his escape and drag him off to The Hague, if it was the Europeans, or probably to the Federal Supermax at ADX Florence in Colorado if it was the Americans; yet more politics would come into play there.
NATO airpower returned to Minsk as the trap was set, with those American B-52s, nine of them in total, again targeting the city. Political pressure from Brussels had led to a brief slackening of the air campaign after the Stratofortress bombers had been utilised before, with the civilian casualties of that raid being immense. This time, the B-52s hit strictly military targets, pummelling the defensive belt which ringed Minsk with JDAMs.
Inside the Belarusian capital, Lukashenko and his cabal of military and security service advisors desperately sought a way out, like a cornered Pitbull lashing out in terror.
President Lukashenko was at that moment regretting the decision to hand over Belarus’ small nuclear arsenal left over from the Cold War back in the 1990s; even a few such weapons would have been enough for his nation and his regime to be saved if they were aimed at Paris and Berlin. Even without those Soviet-era nuclear weapons, however, Lukashenko’s collapsing regime had one last option at its disposal, an option that, like those thermonuclear weapons had been left behind during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These weapons had been held in secret and in very small numbers despite Belarus’ official claims that it did not possess them at all. They had been hidden away in a research facility with less than a kilogram of them available. Unfortunately, the LD50 for the nerve agent known as VX was far smaller than that…
Across the 1st Armored Division’s lines to the west, a shout echoed through the American tankers’ and infantrymen’s positions; “Gas! Gas! Gas!”
One Hundred and Ninety–Two
A significant part of the Russian Twentieth Guards Army might have escaped over the Daugava and through into central Latvia yet a lot more didn’t manage the same feat. They’d ended up left behind for a variety of reasons – tasked a expendable rear-guards, caught in NATO air attacks and running into opposition on the way which they couldn’t get past – and thus in the way of the juggernaut of the NATO force which was the Allied I Corps. From the Baltic Sea to the Belorussian border, this mixed force from a variety of nations moved on to eliminate all those who had been left behind as well as finish off the liberation of Lithuania.
For any Russian or Belorussian in uniform left behind in Lithuania, they weren’t going to see their war end well.
Coming out of Kaliningrad, the left wing of the Allied I Corps moved through the west of Lithuania. The Croats, Dutch, the Poles and the men with the Franco-German Brigade which had recently arrived from Denmark engaged scattered enemy units all over the place. They fought against foreign occupiers in Lithuania who were already under attack from above and were also taking fire on the ground from both NATO special forces teams as well as Lithuanian partisans. The arrival of the heavy NATO ground forces put pay to any serious resistance from them. They couldn’t stop columns of tanks rolling past them and charging onwards while towards them came more armour, infantry and artillery in close support. Russian units posed a stronger threat to NATO units than the Belorussians did yet, in the end, the difference in nationalities didn’t matter once the full force of I Corps firepower could be brought to bear. Pockets of resistance were silenced. Men threw down their weapons and up their arms. Sometimes this was an easy process, other times it wasn’t. In a few exceptional circumstances some conditional surrenders were agreed to but in the main it was a matter of battering the enemy until they gave up with no conditions apart from the promise of good treatment for all and nothing more. At the same time as the trapped pockets of the enemy were silenced, NATO spearheads pushed onwards. They rolled up the Lithuanian coastline and also onwards towards Latvia as well. Huge areas of the small Baltic country which was Lithuania were liberated at once with somewhat ease whereas beforehand, getting here through Kaliningrad had been so tough. There were selective demolitions of infrastructure which a couple of groups of Russian special forces supporting engineers undertook though. The Spetsnaz tried to keep NATO troops back while their engineers blew things up which were certain to aid the onwards progress of Operation Baltic Arrow long after Lithuania was taken. Wrecking port facilities at Klaipeda was one of these missions. NATO had avoided bombing attacks here throughout the war due to Russian inability to use it for their purposes and a NATO desire to open it up once it was retaken. The Russians put an end to those designs. When all was lost, the engineering officers would surrender but the Spetsnaz tried to escape. They feared that they wouldn’t be receiving ‘good treatment’ and to have their rights as POWs respected. In many cases their escape efforts failed, bloodily it must be said with little quarter given to them on several occasions, yet some men did manage to elude capture through various ruses and sometimes just damn good luck.
Where Riga was located and the Daugava ran, the Twentieth Guards Army was behind them in central and eastern parts of Latvia. However, that left western Latvia, including the Courland Peninsula, open for NATO to liberate too like they were doing down in Lithuania. I Corps units closed up on the Lithuanian-Latvian border and started making entry. The Dutch were first in. Their 13th Mechanised Brigade, which had missed much of the war by remaining in Poland on security tasks along the Baltic coast (especially the Gulf of Gdansk area), had entered the fight for Kaliningrad late and then was sent to follow the A12 highway which ran north-south across Western Lithuania. They fought a battle against a Russian rear-guard unit at Eleja, a village which sat at a crossroads just inside Latvia, and then pushed onto the Latvian town of Jelgava. They were stopped here and involved in a bigger fight with the last of the Russian rear-guards and would need help to push onwards. However, this had them outside of Riga and also closing up access to Courland. In the coming days, from where the Dutch had secured, those occupiers left between Jelgava and the sea were all going to be eliminated soon enough as the areas of Latvia near to the Baltic would join those down in Lithuania in being freed as well.
Larger numbers of NATO forces with the I Corps had moved into eastern parts of Lithuania. The multiple heavy divisions – one American, one German and two British (each of the latter with significant Belgian and Canadian components) – had previously been battling the majority of the Twentieth Guards Army. Then the Russians did a runner, making use of night-time and also a lot of trickery to do so. Once aware, there was a chase on to go after them. Ultimately this failed yet it did lead to the American’s 4th Infantry and the British 1st Armoured Divisions getting up to the border with Latvia and then crossing over to where the Daugava was. Behind them, they left more Britons, Canadians, Czechs and Germans to finish off resistance in Lithuania. The capital Vilnius and the city of Kaunas were already in NATO hands but there were more Russians and Belorussians elsewhere. Many fights to took place to overcome them with NATO having all of the advantages in this. The Spanish too played a role where they not only took over behind-the-lines assistance but also secured the corps’ eastern flank. This ran along the Lithuanian-Belorussian border. Over on the other side where the US V Corps was fighting in Belarus, portions of that country far back from this frontier were in NATO hands yet those Belorussians who fought along the border and inside Lithuania aimed to deny NATO entry into their country via this route. Propaganda had been directed at them to tell them they were fighting for a lost cause – the V Corps had an area of occupation which included Grodno, Lida and Asmjany – but this was generally disbelieved. Few defections and little early surrenders came. The Spanish had a difficult time in finally wiping out resistance in this area. The British 3rd Mechanised Division (half its number containing Canadians) and then the German 1st Panzer Division (with a third of them being Czechs) following behind went in a northeastern direction. They sought to reach Latvia and make contact with NATO units in the Daugavpils area. The anticipation was that scattered enemy units would try to slow them down and some tough fights would come, especially from Belorussians guarding their border again. This wasn’t how it was. Only at the town of Utena which was a crossroads along the A6 highway was a delay inflicted and to silence that, the British used a couple of batteries of MLRS systems in targeted fire. It did the trick and a surrender came afterwards. Latvia was entered and the link-up made with those at Daugavpils sooner than expected: the Czechs and Germans turned towards the frontier with Belarus following this.
In the areas behind those significant advances, Lithuania was now nearly all freed. As was seen on the western side of the country, over in the eastern parts there was a re-establishment of sovereignty through a nation which had been previously occupied by hostile forces. Information from NATO sources as well as what information had come out during that occupation led to intelligence-led efforts to arrest collaborators and secure what vital parts of national infrastructure not destroyed. The Lithuanians which came in with NATO forces were few and relied heavily on the support of their coalition partners. A lot of their focus was too on aiding civilians in need. The occupation hadn’t been horrific though it hadn’t been kind on the people either. There were matters of food, clean water and medical help. Providing all of this fell on other countries yet at Lithuanian direction. It was hampered by all of the wartime damage done – including NATO bombing – but went on regardless. There was also the matter of the Lithuanian government who’d been caught inside the country when invaded. There’d been a doomed last stand in the Vilnius area for several days following the invasion. Surrender had eventually come and Russia got its hands on them. The president and other high-level figures had all been taken prisoner. Their fates had been something NATO intelligence efforts had been trying to determine throughout the war and with Vilnius back in friendly hands, there was more that could be done now. A joint Lithuanian-Polish team (though greatly aided by American technical support) when to the village of Antaviliai, located near to Vilnius. In the years 2004 to 2005, the CIA had established one of their ‘black sites’ here during the War on Terror. It had been closed and the Lithuanian’s own intelligence agency – the VSD – had moved in to make use of it as a training facility. When Vilnius fell, the Russians had first taken many VIP prisoners here. Those had included the country’s president and defence minister; the body of the prime minister, killed in an artillery strike, was also transferred there too. Dalia Grybauskaitė and Rasa Juknevičienė had afterwards been taken elsewhere though the corpse of Andrius Kubilius was present when the Lithuanian and Polish investigators arrived. The prime minister’s remains were to be treated to a proper funeral but the hunt was on for signs of what could have happened to the president and defence minister. Had they been killed and buried near here? Or was there any evidence they’d been removed to Russia? The Lithuanians wanted to know.
The US XVIII Corps had taken substantial losses in Latvia when the Twentieth Guards Army blew through the center of their defensive line leading to the Disaster on the Daugava. It wasn’t just the British TA with their 2nd Infantry Division but also a brigade of the US 7th Infantry Division and corps support assets too. The Russians had hit the weakest units in the middle of the blocking positions established along the Daugava to stop them crossing. It cost them a lot but NATO also had major casualties. Regardless, the line was reestablished afterwards. The rest of the 7th Infantry came in from the west and the British 6th Airmobile Division moved up from the east. The 2nd Infantry had no role in this and what was left of it was instead used to secure the flanks of the British and Belgian troops with the 6th Airmobile. The corps commander wanted to break up the 2nd Infantry afterwards. Only one of its three brigades could be considered combat capable and he wanted to add it to the 6th Airmobile: the two further brigades would be temporarily disestablished. That decision was taken out of his hands though and became a political matter.
General Mattis down in Krakow would be stuck with that headache.
The US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division missed the Russian penetration of the Daugava Line due to being tied up with Riga at the time. The distraction that others elsewhere had feared the Latvian capital would be for them, leading them to not focus on holding the river, had turned out to be true. They were right on its outskirts, taking it away from Russian paratroopers and militia units. Pulling them out was something considered but rejected: again this was a matter of outside politics interfering. Once the Daugava was declared blocked again and the Allied I Corps started arriving there after driving through Lithuania, orders came to the XVIII Corps to ‘finish the job’ with Riga. That they now did. Riga was entered properly. Several NATO warships had had a path cleared through the minefields in the Gulf of Riga and they supported from the water with shelling the final capture of the city. The victory won by the 82nd Airborne was partially delayed for a few hours when, in the middle of a Russian artillery barrage, several chemical alarms went off. This was only a few hours after the Belorussians had used nerve gas outside of Minsk. It turned out to be a false alarm but it gave a lot of people a fright. Even the men serving with the 76th Guards Air Assault Division reacted too it once seeing what the Americans were doing. They knew that they hadn’t used gas but didn’t know if someone else had given such weapons to the militia units fighting here. Once the gas alarms were silenced, and the threat confirmed to be nothing, the fighting went on. Riga was taken. Russian Airborne Troops staged a retreat afterwards, falling away to the north in a fighting withdrawal up the A1 highway. Most of those men were on foot though there were many armoured vehicles as well as some captured civilian transport. Being out on that road brought them away from the urban area where there had been civilians. An air attack was expected and NATO didn’t disappoint. Naval gunfire from offshore joined in as well. Plenty of bombs fell from aircraft above though it wasn’t the biggest of air strikes: Minsk was getting plenty of attention. The 76th Guards were left hurting but not destroyed.
Throughout central parts of Latvia and into the eastern parts, the Russians were now starting to establish their own defensive line. The Twentieth Guards Army redeployed. It faced contact on the ground from XVIII Corps units but this wasn’t enough to stop them from getting ready to hold a position that NATO would have to fight them out of should they want to liberate the rest of Latvia and then go on into Estonia as well. The I Corps was coming up to do that with their heavy forces.
Unlike Lithuania, Latvia wasn’t going to be abandoned by the Russians.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:52:15 GMT
One Hundred and Ninety Three
When Belarusian artillery units had unleashed chemical weapons in the form of VX gas against NATO forces surrounding their capital, a threshold had been crossed. Though a relatively small amount of gas had been used, the sheer lethality of the substance meant that there were numerous fatalities. The artillery shells had airburst above American lines in the midst of a conventional artillery attack, and although troops were at a MOPP-2 posture (NBC suits worn, gloves, masks & overshoes carried) allowing them to get into their full protective suits very quickly, nobody even knew a chemical attack was underway until a couple of minutes after the shells had detonated. The unit that would suffer the most was the 4th Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, US Army. That mechanized unit, with two companies of Bradley fighting vehicles and one of Abrams tanks, along with a scout platoon and various support units, saw over two hundred casualties, thirty percent of which would be fatalities.
Chemical alarms went off within minutes of the attack, but by that point fatal doses had already been received by many. Chemical weapons are often thought of as having horror film effects with the victims vomiting blood and screaming in pain. In reality, these symptoms were void. What the soldiers of the 1st Armored Division witnessed was something far more macabre. Those who had received doses of VX first seemed to burst into laughter or tears before losing total control of their bodily functions. They collapsed to the ground, writhing on their backs, kicking and punching the air spasmodically before death mercifully came through complete respiratory depression.
It truly was an awful thing to witness. Those who had scrambled into their gas masks in time made every effort to save their comrades. Sometimes, those afflicted by the gas would be so out of control that they had to be restrained by their fellow soldiers. In one case, a soldier trying to administer atropine had his gas mask accidentally torn off by his dying comrade, thus becoming exposed to VX just like the man he had been trying to save. In theory, the MOPP-2 posture should have meant that many more lives were saved. However, the gas utilised by the Belarusians was of an advanced Soviet design, and was extremely fast-acting. Chemical alarms worked slower than advertised, and enough gas was held in each air bursting shell that those below would be exposed to a fatal dose extremely quickly. There was also the issue of men becoming wounded by shrapnel from conventional artillery rounds. Even light flesh wounds caused by conventional weapons would tear open NBC suits, leading to the individual being contaminated with VX.
Total US casualties numbered at 187 dead and 264 wounded. It should have been less; it would have been, had the chemical alarms worked like those operating them had been told they would. The soldiers had been betrayed by contractors so eager to profit off of their equipment and by Pentagon officials who wanted the purchases completed and their careers advanced. This time, those responsible would not escape scot-free. There would be Congressional hearings and eventually criminal charges brought about several years down the line. None of that mattered to the 1st Armored Division in the immediate moments after the attack.
Word filtered back to NATO units across the board that Belarusian troops had used chemical weapons outside of Minsk. NATO units advancing on enemy forces showed no quarter after receiving this news, with extremely few prisoners being taken throughout the day. On an official level, NATO leaders needed to respond. It quickly became clear that Belarusian forces had launched the chemical attack, with real questions being asked about where the gas had been procured.
London and Paris agreed to hold off on a response of their own, as their forces had not been hit with VX – not yet, anyway – leaving the decision to President Biden. Prime Minister Cameron did, however, advise against a nuclear response, while President Sarkozy contrarily made it clear that he would support a tactical nuclear strike in retaliation, as the US had said it would do back on the first night of the war. Despite the promises made there and overall US doctrine calling for a nuclear strike, President Biden felt that it would be far too dangerous to use nuclear weapons with Russian forces also present in Minsk, and that it would almost certainly lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange.
Biden wasn’t going to end the world over less than 200 fatalities no matter what those in Congress and in his own cabinet said he should do. A variety of options were put forward, most strikingly the reactivation of American stocks of Sarin gas. The US had pledged to destroy its chemical arsenal when it had signed the Chemical Weapons Convention back in 1993, and the only chemical weapons that remained were those awaiting destruction. Serious consideration was given to the use of those surviving weapons. The Joint Chiefs told President Biden that it would take no less than ten days, however, for Sarin-loaded artillery munitions to reach the Seventh Army.
Another option was finally settled on. GBU-43 Massive Ordinance Air Blasts like the one which had been used against Libya in the aftermath of Operation Midnight Talon were to be utilised. The morning after the gas attack, two C-130s, both belonging to the US Air Force, headed into Belarusian airspace. Each was escorted by eight F-16CGs loaded with AGM-88s for defence suppression purposes, but no enemy SAMs dared turn on their radars.
The first MOAB fell on the main junction between the M-6 & M-9 Highways just west of Minsk, where Belarusian forces were dug in in large numbers. The humungous explosion tore the junction apart as the fireball expanded. The wind caused by the blast literally pulled people’s lungs from their bodies from its sheer force. Over a thousand people, troops and hapless civilians alike, perished along with the highway intersection and the nearby bridges and buildings. A second MOAB fell to the grounds of the Belarusian State Economic University, in the middle of the city, which was being used as a command post to coordinate the city’s defence. The complex collapsed into rubble, killing almost two thousand Belarusians as well hundreds of Allied POWs being used as human shields at the makeshift command centre.
Shortly after the MOAB strikes, a message was sent over the Moscow-Washington hotline. Typed out in an advance, it was a cold and dire warning to Putin about further use of weapons of mass destruction by his own government or by that of his Belarusian ally. The United States, Britain, and France, the message said, would respond to further WMD use with nuclear weapons, and they would do so massively, disproportionately, and without limiting targets to military facilities. Potential targets were even shown to the Russians, beginning with St Petersburg International Airport and the city’s dockyards as well as troop marshalling areas and railway nodes around Smolensk; twenty-eight nuclear weapons would be used to destroy these targets over the course of half-an-hour. President Putin was told that this would happen immediately if there was even the suspicion that further chemical or biological weapons usage had taken place.
The world held its breathy as V Corps prepared to assault the now contaminated Minsk…
One Hundred and Ninety–Four
Those big bombs weren’t dropped on Minsk at random locations. The major road junction around where Belorussian defensive efforts were clustered and the command post were struck because there were strategic targets as well as having an operational, even tactical value too. In addition to the primary goal of retaliating to the gas attack, American intentions were to smash the ability of Lukashenko’s regime to stop their capital from falling to NATO’s armies.
The Battle of Minsk was underway with use made of the advantages given by the use of the MOAB weapons.
Three of the combat divisions under US V Corps command took part in the opening moves to seize Minsk: the US Army’s 1st Armored & 101st Air Assault Divisions as well as the 12th Mechanised Division from the Polish Army. Those latter troops had spent most of war on Polish soil and only recently come to Belarus but they were here now and once more in the fight. The Americans went forward first and through that hole in the city’s western defences which had been ripped open. Tanks and infantry carriers moved in sent by the Old Ironsides before the Screaming Eagles dispatched some men via HMMWVs yet the majority on foot. There was a little use of helicopters too by the 101st Air Assault though anti-air defences in the form of shoulder mounted SAMs and AA guns limited those operations. NATO defence suppression against more capable missile launchers had been effective but the man-portable & lighter weapons were present in number and extremely dangerous… as the Screaming Eagles had found out to their cost around first Grodno and then Lida.
Belorussian forces were unable to stop the Americans getting inside the defensive line which they had established on the basis of the M-9 highway ring-road which went around their capital. The V Corps specially chose areas where VX gas had been used for supporting incursions, going through sections where local wind conditions had blown some of those chemicals back towards the Belorussians themselves. Vehicles were sealed up with overpressure systems switched on and the penetrations made. When the Poles made their attack not long after the Americans, those supposedly stronger defences collapsed as well. The lines were shattered and the conquerors rolled in with no serious ability from the defenders of the regime to stop them on the ground or through any form of organised counterattack. They just no longer had any fight in them.
Minsk began to quickly fall. The V Corps started out aiming to eliminate enemy forces and slow cleave off parts of the defences. The Belorussians crumbled though. Yes, at times there was much good effort put in by them, especially firing on helicopters and managing to ambush some tank columns with long-range shots from man-portable ATGM systems, but those bright spots were few and far between. The Americans and the Poles were everywhere, taking over the capital of Belarus fast. Elsewhere, other elements of the corps were fighting through central Belarus against Russian forces and engaging in some hard – though ultimately successful – engagements yet things were very different here. Now that they had broken inside the defences, the Americans and the Poles were hitting surviving defenders who were positioned to stop an attack coming from without now from within. Large-scale surrenders started occurring by men attacked from the rear who just gave up in droves.
Several of the V Corps’ operations staff were veterans of the drive into Baghdad in 2003. These US Army officers recalled how the thinking with the Iraqi capital had been the same as it had been here – that the city would take long to fall – but things here with Lukashenko’s city were going even quicker that the capital over which Saddam had once ruled. The senior planning officer already had discussed with the corps’ G3 doing something that had been done in Baghdad and that was given permission to do on the afternoon of the attack. The risk was high but a Thunder Run was made to go into the very heart, the government quarter, of the city.
Task Force 2–70 ARM (a battalion group of tanks and mechanised infantry built around the 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment) was given the go ahead. Men from the 1st Armored were going to get revenge for what happened to their fellow Old Ironsides soldiers in that gas attack by striking at what should have been the regime’s beating core. Abrams, Bradleys and armoured engineering & recovery vehicles – nothing light like a HMMWV or a truck – shot forwards supported by ground-hugging Apache gunships in the sky. They drove for two of the city’s main squares: October Square and Victory Square. A couple of embedded reporters went with them, sent to report on history as it was made.
Sniping and the odd RPG shot came against the column of the TF 2–70 ARM but there was no serious opposition. Where were the roadside bombs? The suicide bombers in vehicles? Barricades supported by anti-tank guns, roving missile teams and tanks hidden inside buildings were absent too. The Belorussians should have expected something like this, surely? They didn’t. They didn’t think the Americans would ever get inside. Only a couple of embarrassing instances of getting just a little bit lost slowed up the Americans. The streets were empty as people sheltered in their homes waiting for more B-52 strikes or more of those horrible vacuum bombs… or even for the Americans to use chemical weapons again like they had been told they had the day before. With nothing to stop them apart from navigation errors, TF 2–70 ARM located their objectives and moved on them with ease.
At October Square, the American soldiers found the rubble of what once had been Lukashenko’s official residence. Late summer rain started to fall as they parked their vehicles outside the Palace of Presidential Administration. Some shots were exchanged here with Belorussian regular soldiers – not the reservist and militia elsewhere – but none of the men with TF 2–70 ARM could understand why there was any fight for a pile of rubble courtesy of the US Air Force. A mixed company of tanks & infantry stayed behind here while the rest of the battalion group moved onwards, up the road, to Victory Square. There were a couple of missile launches from ATGMs which destroyed a Bradley and damaged an Abrams: Belorussian regulars active once more. Return fire was carefully directed. A pre-mission briefing had issued instructions to avoid the bringing down of the huge monumental obelisk in the middle of the square. This granite column celebrating the war against the Nazis. Toppling it by accident might not go down too well here but also elsewhere in propaganda terms. There were more remains of what had once been ‘regime targets’ here too. The important national television & radio centre had long been blown up and the nearby defence ministry had received the same sort of attention from the air. This was the American’s own propaganda, their very presence. More rain fell as the heavens opened. It washed away the blood of those few who had chosen to die here. This kept most people inside though some did venture the weather to come outside and see the foreign soldiers who were in their capital. The Americans had their weapons ready to open fire because elsewhere in Belarus the Belorussians had fought well but that wasn’t the case here. Neither did they celebrate their ‘liberation’ though.
They were just curious.
The Thunder Run – something invented in Vietnam though which gained fame after Baghdad – was done to test enemy defences and the resolve to fight. That resolve had been found lacking elsewhere around Minsk and now in the very centre too. The rest of the parent brigade to which TF 2–70 ARM arrived. More of the Old Ironsides (two of the four brigades came in; one of the other two had taken gas casualties while the other stood ready waiting to move on any ambush) entered Minsk, coming in through the opened route. Even fewer shots from die-hard regime loyalists met them. Casualties were light for the 1st Armored and also the 101st Air Assault too. Where the Poles entered the city, they too came in ready for a fight. There were several cases where they exercised less restraint than the Americans had done in dealing with isolated fire against them – firing back with several tank canons against a sniper in a window for instance – but this was expected: Belarus had caused so much pain to Poland and vengeance was sought. Their soldiers knew how Warsaw had been the target of all of those Scud missiles. Overall though, light resistance meant that much of Minsk was in NATO hands before the daylight finished and those were the bits regarded as important especially when the French at the airport were reached too.
The night saw full control over the city move to be established. The Americans secured the central, southern and western parts with their control over transport routes. They also sent men to other key buildings too: those still standing. They went to the parliamentary complex, Government House, somewhere which had survived World War Three like it had miraculously came through World War Two, and also to the facilities of the Belorussian KGB… places which had been bombed but which still had interest for the occupiers. Soldiers from the Screaming Eagles, veterans of MOUT (military operations in urban terrain), were in their element in doing this in a conquered city where they secured it fully. However, there was gunfire which occurred during the night. Taking advantage of the cover offered by darkness, committed Belorussians and the odd Russian detachment too launched a few attacks against the Poles through the north and the east of Minsk. The former reported to a dying regime; the latter were under instructions from the Kremlin. Polish military casualties came and so too were deaths recorded among Belorussian civilians caught in the crossfire. Once more, the Polish hadn’t been gentle especially when ambushed and even fired upon some of those ugly Soviet-era apartment buildings from where shots had come: NATO jets in the sky over Minsk, RAF Tornados and French Mirage-2000s, had received orders from above to not drop bombs on such buildings much to the Poles fury with that. The British and French blamed the weather yet it had been the unwillingness not to kill hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians by doing that that had seen no bomb runs like that take place. Polish T-72 tanks and BMP-1 infantry carriers – the 12th Mechanised had only Soviet-era equipment, nothing newer – were hit by downwards shots and so up into those buildings and in between them went Polish infantry teams supported by heavy fire from below. The battlefield which their allies hadn’t wanted to see such places become entered up being fought over though at least not brought down.
Yet, by morning, much of this was over. Those who wanted to fight were few and far between as well as significantly outgunned once the well-experienced Polish 12th Mechanised got ‘down and dirty’ with them in urban fighting.
Footage of Minsk’s fall was broadcast around the world.
In the Kremlin, they pictured in their minds American soldiers & tanks in Red Square and crawling over the remains of the building in which they sat. They also reflected upon the previous belief that Minsk was supposed to hold out for a significant period of time. Back home in the United States, images of their soldiers raising the American flag in Minsk were celebrated. What the footage didn’t show were concerns that NATO governments had. Minsk hadn’t been expected to fall in less than a day! They now occupied an city with a million and a half plus inhabitants, none of them who appeared to be keen to be freed from their government, many of them having weapons recently issued by a government on its last legs, and all of whom responsibility for fell upon the conqueror. They’d need feeding, access to medical care and security. They’d have to be treated well too. The possibility of Minsk turning into a Baghdad was considered impossible but it could be another Daugavpils yet on a far bigger scale than that Latvian city. NATO would have to be careful here.
Detachments of Green Berets, SAS and French 13e RDP special forces were in the city. It was they whom soldiers serving with the Screaming Eagles escorted to certain other locations around Minsk looking for people on lists which they worked through. Number One on that list was President Lukashenko. He was being hunted here though not to be found inside the city. He was on the run, but for how long…?
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:53:37 GMT
One Hundred and Ninety Five
President Lukashenko wasn't going to be allowed to get away. He was a war criminal, a man who had participated in a war of aggression against NATO, who had not only authorised but outright ordered the abuse and torture of Prisoners of War and the use of hostages, and a man who was responsible for the use of chemical weapons against the US Army.
The Belarusian President was now outside the capital city as it fell to NATO. He wasn't found in any of the government buildings searched through by Allied troops, but rather has gone into hiding with several members of his security staff and military chiefs.
There were plenty of individuals still loyal to the regime and the exiled President moved from Minsk to a safehouse in Barysaw, which despite the effective collapse of the Belarusian government, remained a city loyal to Lukashenko or at least opposed to NATO.
Hot on his heels were NATO special operations units. Intelligence collected from across Minsk sent Allied troops towards Barysaw with the intention of capturing Lukashenko.
Barysaw was within the sights of Allied commandos.
A joint force led by soldiers from the SAS went towards the city, flying aboard American Black Hawk helicopters. The SAS men were a force thirty-two strong and led by a major. Joining them were two twelve man Green Beret Alpha Teams, along with a company of specialist soldiers from the British Army’s Special Forces Support Group or SFSG, Britain’s answer to the 75th Ranger Regiment.
On the ground came more Allied troops. American tanks from the 1st Armored Division broke off from their main formation. A whole company of tanks and a platoon of mechanized infantry as well came after Lukashenko to provide fire support. Barysaw, as expected, put up resistance as Lukashenko loyalists tried to prevent the forcing of the city by NATO troops.
British and American commandos fast-roped onto the deck under enemy fire as the American tankers entered the city. Air support from above was plentiful with transport helicopters using their miniguns to provide fire support. The suspected safe house was surrounded by SFSG members and American tanks as a perimeter was secured, and then the SAS and Green Berets stormed the building.
Men were shot dead by the raiders, but Lukashenko wasn’t there; he was fleeing east in a truck, one prisoner told him after being encouraged to talk by a Belarusian interpreter working with NATO troops, a man who had lost his son to this insane war!
As the American tankers moved to pursue, ambushes occurred with gunfire and RPGs aimed at them. This did little more than scratch their paint but it slowed the tankers down as they engaged their targets.
The vehicle was spotted as it tried to pass through the city’s urban streets, and the commandos fought their way through Barysaw to stop it. The vehicle was rendered inoperable by gunfire from a patrolling Black Hawk helicopter, and then the SAS commandos snatched the Belarusian President, throwing him to the floor before he was cuffed and hooded.
One Hundred and Ninety–Six
There wasn’t just one small collection of like-minded members of the Security Council of Russia who were meeting secretly away from the formal gatherings to discuss joint approaches and dishing the dirty on others. FSB Director Bortnikov had discovered that away from his group, there was a second group who had their own private talks. While not exactly by chance, though not something that was being directly sought, FSB officers ended up monitoring a meeting where Prime Minister Ivanov hosted both the Foreign Minister and also the head of the GRU: Kozak and Shlyakhturov. This trio had a lot of unpleasant things to say about those whom he was spending time with but also him too.
As can be expected, he was rather upset to hear those things said – especially from the previously non-hostile Ivanov – though through his anger, Bortnikov also saw opportunity. How that would play out, how he could turn this all to his advantage, was what he had been pondering over when he and everyone else was called in again for another Security Council gathering. Minsk had been entered and then quickly taken by NATO forces. Soon afterwards, they’d snatched President Lukashenko as well. Like so much else, none of this was supposed to happen. It all came as another unwelcome surprise for him and everyone else.
It was at this meeting where Security Council head Patrushev chose to reveal the contents of the latest communication sent by the Americans. It had been held back from some members – Bortnikov among them – until now. He learnt that after the Belorussian gas attack on the Americans outside of Minsk, there had been a direct threat to Russia made over the Washington-to-Moscow Hot-Line. They’d threatened the Rodina with nuclear attacks if there was further use of chemical weapons. Such strategic strikes weren’t alluded to, weren’t hinted at but specifically stated in clear language. Bortnikov’s immediate reaction upon hearing this was just like those over several of his colleagues who were hearing this for the first time too: rage.
How dare they!
We’ll do the same back!
However, he also had the presence of mind to notice the non-reaction from others. Bortnikov was able to see who had previous knowledge of that message. Putin – obviously –, Kozak, General Makarov, Patrushev and Shlyakhturov were those already in the know. None of them were among those in Bortnikov’s group of allies. Among those who looked to him as a leader now, Defence Minister Zubkov hadn’t been informed until now either. Bortnikov truly shared the man’s clear outrage at not being told of this as he read that on his face. Putting aside all his own plots and plans, Bortnikov believed that it was only right that the nation’s defence minister should have been told this beforehand. That hadn’t been the case though.
After this, things got interesting… in the Chinese sense.
The reason why the moment to do this now had been chosen became apparent. It was all about a decision to be made to use gas once again.
It had been the Belorussians who had attempted to inflict serious casualties on the US Army and degrade its fighting potential by employing VX. However, while all of those involved in the process of the partially successful attack had been Belorussians, the hand of Russia, the Security Council, was behind this. Just because those at the sharp end didn’t know they were acting for Russia didn’t mean that they weren’t. Lukashenko himself, the dictator who at that time was in his last days as Belarus’ leader, wasn’t the one ultimately behind that. It was these men here in Moscow, Bortnikov among them, who had signed off on the attack. The idea had been that the Americans could face serious issues when hit with gas: it was hoped that a couple of combat brigades, even a division, might be knocked out of action. Any response was to fall on the Belorussians too.
Patrushev spoke of a series of chemical weapons strikes to take place. The plan was to unleash gas against non-American troops in both Belarus and Latvia. Troops from the smaller NATO countries were to be deliberately targeted. Those undertaking the attack would once more be exclusively non-Russian with Belorussians and Moscow-linked Militia the ones who would get their hands dirty. There were untraceable stocks of chemicals, all with the planted fingerprints of others (metaphorical prints) on them, to be used. Civilian casualties were expected to occur, though those were unimportant. The intention was to force several nations among NATO and the wider Coalition to have their appetite for continuing the war crumble remarkably once this occurred.
Putin asked for thoughts on this from his top-tier people.
Kozak was the first to speak up. He pounced on this idea, giving it his full support. The United States hadn’t used nuclear weapons when its own troops were gassed, he said, and they wouldn’t even consider doing so for those smaller countries. With a sneer, he reeled off the names of such ‘little’ nations – Belgium, the Czech Republic and Hungary – who the Americans would see their troops gassed and do nothing about it. When nothing was done, NATO’s war effort would fracture. He was convinced this would work and even asked why it wasn’t done sooner. Afterwards, NATO would come cap in hand begging for a diplomatic solution to the war.
Reshetnikov attempted to say something in response but no one would discover what it was. He’d taken over the SVR after Fradkov had had his ‘accident’ and found that that organisation’s claws had been clipped. His respect among the others was rather low. That was especially true when it came to General Makarov. The armed forces C-in-C interrupted him before Reshetnikov got a few words out and urged caution. He wasn’t opposed to the usage of gas but spoke of all of the Russian reservists deployed forward and their aged chemical protection gear. Russia could easily end up coming off with far more casualties than the better-prepared NATO.
Taken by surprise, Bortnikov witnessed outbursts of stringent objection to this plan coming from both Shoygu and the defence minister. The Minister for Emergency Situations joined with Zubkov in stating that this was a foolish and dangerous idea. Shoygu’s people were still overwhelmed with addressing the fallout from that biological weapons leak and he expressed concern over whether the wind blew the wrong way and spread nerve gas into Russia. The defence minister spoke of Makarov’s reservations about the danger to Russian soldiers but more so rejected what Kozak was saying about the Americans doing nothing in response. Neither of them supported this and the strength of their objections was something he had seen in private on other matters yet Bortnikov hadn’t expected them to do so in public like this.
Whether others were going to speak up – Ivanov, Bortnikov’s co-conspirator General Gerasimov and also Shlyakhturov – wasn’t something that the answer was going to be discovered. A full-on argument commenced between Kozak on one side and Shoygu & Zubkov on the other. The foreign minister told Shoygu that the effects of the bio-leak should long ago have been properly addressed: he personally had failed to see this was done properly. As to the defence minister, Kozak told him that his real concern should be on finding out who was responsible for that failure last week of the Volk operation in Belarus and when it came to worrying about Russian troops dealing with gas, Zubkov should get control of things properly to make sure that they were prepared. That gave it back as good as they got it, tearing into all of Kozak’s previous assertions about NATO being on the brink of internal collapse – each time which had been proved to be false – and his current promise that the use of gas would this time cause that.
Previous arguments among the Security Council had been halted by Patrushev. Bortnikov saw Putin touch his arm briefly when he was about to do this. There was no call for order and to respect the presence of the president. The argument did die down though it did get rather personal throughout. Bortnikov waited for Putin to then announce a course of action to be taken in reflection to all of these comments. That didn’t happen. Instead, Shlyakhturov turned the meeting to something else when he asked Patrushev if they could discuss the continued domestic troubles in Western Russia. Ivanov was turned to and instructed to bring them up to speed on the anti-war marches going on. This wasn’t his usual brief but he followed orders and did so. Bortnikov was no fan of the man though had to admit that he was on top of things here. He himself was asked by Putin to list further FSB actions with regard to this and did so. It was Makarov’s turn for questioning next. He informed the Security Council upon request about that state of all of those reservists who had taken an extraordinary time to get prepared to see war yet were now arriving on the Russian-Belorussian border and also into Latvia. They couldn’t preform any serious offensive task, he was sorry to say, but they were digging-in and were getting ready to stop a drive on Smolensk or Tallinn by NATO’s tanks. NATO was bombing them already yet they were capable of holding out for some time. Patrushev had questions about numbers of desertions. Those were few, came the response, and the only real issue with anything like that had been the earlier failure from thousands to answer the call to mobilise: now in the field, those men on the frontlines were going to fight to defend the Rodina.
Kozak brought them back to the gas issue again. That was what they were here to discuss and, still smarting from the verbal tirade he’d taken, he wanted to see a resolution to the question. He wanted to win the argument, Bortnikov believed.
Were chemical weapons going to be used again?
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
Posts: 7,608
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:55:11 GMT
One Hundred and Ninety Seven
Lukashenko’s regime was gone and much of Belarus had been liberated. What was left of the Belarusian Army rapidly fell apart as NATO airpower pounded them. There was no organised central command structure left and the largest forces that remained operating were those at the battalion level, and even many of those had lost their leaders as they either made to flee to Russia or were killed by NATO commandos, aircraft, or artillery.
US Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) forces were moving heaven and earth to get those last remnants of the Belarusian military to lay down their arms and also to convince the people of Belarus that Lukashenko was gone, whether they liked it or not, and that NATO was now in charge. C-130 aircraft dropped thousands of pamphlets telling the Belarusian people just that, while Radio Free Europe blasted the airwaves with anti-Russian propaganda. The fall of Lukashenko was welcomed in some circles and opposed in others, with many militiamen laying down their arms, and in some cases, joyously greeting NATO troops as their liberators from the oppressive and tyrannical regime.
In other, less idyllic cases, however, resistance was met as poorly-armed but ferocious loyalists to the last vestiges of the regime tried to halt or at least bloody the NATO advance. Casualties, even in small numbers, were considered to be a good thing by these resistors. The objective for them now was not to repulse the NATO advance but to make it stop through its own casualty numbers, but this was a hopeless endeavour after everything V Corps had seen in this war so far.
Men died in great numbers throughout those last days, most of them Belarusian but some American, French, Italian, Polish, and other nationalities as well. It was effectively all over, NATO commanders reasoned, so why oh why could the Belarusians not see that yet? Those that fought back killed some of the hated invaders and then died themselves and after everything the troops had seen, many remarked that t looked rather pointless.
Why should so many die now at this late stage, when the result of World War III was already determined?
Although the Belarusian State had all but collapsed, Allied forces had yet to reach the Russian border. V Corps began to race towards the border region, seeking to eliminate what was left of the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 36th Army before they could escape back into Russia, where they would not be pursued.
The last remnants of the Lukashenko regime were taken down as NATO troops patrolled the streets, but that territory between Minsk and the border had to be taken. The 1st Cavalry & 1st Armored Divisions raced to the border with the French Army not far behind them, fighting their way through whatever opposition faced them. The goal was to prevent the Russian forces from escaping, and to have a NATO military presence across all of Belarus before an insurgency could gain confidence or get off of the ground.
In an effort to achieve the former objective, NATO airpower pummelled the Russian columns escaping over the border throughout the last days of the battle for Belarus. Helicopter gunships, strategic bombers and tactical fighters all played their part with thousands of tonnes of munitions unleashed on those below, with the Allies suffering minimal losses due to the near total elimination of Russia’s air defence assets.
When NATO failed to totally obliterate the remnants of Russia’s forces in Belarus, General Mattis gambled. A division-sized force containing dozens of units, virtually all eliminated to the battalion size, from various Russian corps-level commands had made it over the border back into Russia, moving along the E-30 Highway. Mattis sent elements of the 35th Armor Regiment careering across the border into the flanks of that rag-tag Russian force.
The fighting took place short of Smolensk and was the only major land engagement on Russian soil; it was a tremendous gamble for Mattis to take, but the risks were, he decided, worth it. Blocking positions were established on the E-30 and the Russians ran straight into those before Allied airpower returned and finished them off, with over four thousand becoming casualties in the space of just six hours, before NATO forces were immediately ordered back over the border into Belarus.
One Hundred and Ninety–Eight
Through central parts of Latvia, on the northern side of the Daugava River, what would become the most vicious fighting of the war was now taking place. The loss of life here would be immense and the destruction caused would leave this region of the Baltic nation in many ways afterwards resembling some of the infamous battlefields of previous world wars: the Somme, Monte Casino and Okinawa. This third global conflict would see costly fights yet nothing like this had yet to occur.
The Battle of the Daugava would see casualties in the (low) tens of thousands.
Russian Army reservists had been deployed here and they were supported by elements of the Twentieth Guards Army which had managed to escape from Lithuania. Those former conscripts recalled to service were equipped with old but reliable & lethal equipment. They had dug-in and were tasked to fight a generally static battle with those regulars meant to provide a mobile localised counterattack force. There wasn’t any real room for the reservists to manoeuvre: they were here and would die here. NATO had pulled the US XVIII Corps out of the battle-line and brought up the Allied I Corps. They aimed to fight a mobile battle and one fully supported by on-hand fire support aplenty. The intention was to batter their way through the defensive line which had so recently been strung across Latvia and then charge onwards towards Estonia. These two different concepts for how this battle was to be fought clashed just as the soldiers from many different armies did in this mid-September fight for control of the Baltic States.
NATO units forced their way through Russian defences. The Americans with their 4th Infantry Division near to Riga, the British & Canadians with the 3rd Mechanised Division in the area around Jēkabpils and the Germans & Czechs with the 1st Panzer Division on the far side of Daugavpils battered their way through those Russian defences. Their penetrations allowed for other units in support to then move through as well to start hitting the enemy positions from the flanks and even behind where possible. These fights took place in the countryside and also through towns and villages. Only NATO aircraft were in the sky – even Russian armed helicopters weren’t able to get near here as the skies belonged to NATO – but both sides filled the air with artillery shells and rockets. The Russians had a lot of big guns. They’d pulled howitzers and heavy mortars from warehouses just like they had done with tanks and other armoured vehicles. NATO counter-fire against that artillery, as well as firings done to support their own troops, helped make sure that the destruction was widespread. While aircraft above could drop some accurate and devasting bombs, it was all of those artillery which did most of the damage and caused so many casualties. Extensive minefields surrounded the Russian positions. NATO tried to blow some of these up ahead of going forward and the Russians too had command-detonated mines which they laid in surprise. Once more, there was explosion after explosion.
Tank cannons fired like those of artillery. NATO tanks moved forward and there was some mobile activity from Russian tanks though many of those in Russian service fired in-place. This made them easy prey for counterfire yet there were an awful lot of them. Coming out of all of those storage sites came Soviet-era tanks such as T-64s, -72s and -80s. These were un-modified vehicles without the latest additions in terms of equipment. Their cannons still worked though and those could fire shells and guided-missiles. NATO had plenty of tanks too. There were American M-1s, British Challengers, Leopards in service with the Canadians and the Germans and even some T-72s that the Czechs had. The Belgians brought some Leopards to the fight and so did the Dutch when they entered follow-up fights. Each side saw losses to their kings of the battlefield yet there were onboard explosions when infantry vehicles were hit as well in great numbers. Most of those had disgorged their human cargoes of infantry but were fulfilling fire support roles. Central Latvia would be afterwards littered with the smouldering remains of so many expensive tracked and wheeled armoured vehicles.
Among all of this firepower, there was the infantry fighting.
NATO sought to avoid major engagements with significant numbers of boots-on-the-ground but the fight which the Russians gave them saw I Corps units forced to undertake these. Russian riflemen and missile teams were everywhere and if they weren’t blasted out of those positions that they’d established, then they would have to be dug out. No advance could continue if this wasn’t down. Here the Russian Army was able to do what it had been unable to do since the very beginning of the war and inflict large casualties on NATO forces. They held their own. Counterattacks were made to retake ground that their opponents had just recently won from them. Only by bringing in significant firepower and overwhelming the defenders with numbers could NATO push onwards. These Russian riflemen were those who’d answered the call to defend the Rodina when so many others hadn’t. Their patriotism and morale might have been tempered significantly when faced with what they were exposed to on the battlefield but they fought onwards. They died in their thousands yet saw to it that NATO counterparts were taken with them.
Infantrymen involved in the close-up fighting but in addition all service personnel on & beyond the frontlines serving in the opposing armies were all prepared for the usage of chemical weapons. NBC suits were worn and vehicles sealed up. This made everything difficult and slowed things down but it was done. There were countless false alarms of gas though there were occasionally some real alerts too when it came to residual traces of the Marburg virus that had been transferred into Latvia by the movement of Russian forces through infected areas in their own country. When shelling, gunfire and accidents ripped holes in protective gear, soldiers panicked. Men complained about their level of protection too with this occurring everywhere among those with the latest gear and those outfitted with ancient equipment. No gas was used during the Battle of the Daugava. Other violations of the laws of war occurred though. Surrendered prisoners and enemy wounded were killed. There was the use of human shields – POWs and civilians caught in the middle of this fight – and the attacking of medical units. These actions would be denied by all parties afterwards when charges were levelled against their side though strongly asserted when it came to the ‘other guys’ doing this. Soldiers from many nationalities were involved in this but more than that, there was a lot of looking the other way too.
It had taken there days before the I Corps was able to force its way clear of where the furious fighting had taken place and move onwards. The Americans near to the sea got furthest out ahead and the Polish 16th Mechanised Division, then one of the Dutch brigades too (the Poles and Dutch both having been involved in liberating the Courland region), joined them in moving northwards. Naval shelling and friendly air cover which didn’t have to face air defences in depth helped with this. The Estonian-Latvian border was still some distance off but a breakthrough had been made. Elsewhere though, the rest of the I Corps was unable to follow them in pushing onwards. They’d won what it was becoming fast apparent was only the first fight. There were more of those Russian defences. Russia had sent more reservists to Latvia. They weren’t lambs to the slaughter because they came equipped for a fight which while one they would be sure to lose, they would still take part in. NATO aircraft bombed them from above yet the rest of the I Corps didn’t move forward to engage them.
Politics was at play now.
On their way to the Baltic as reinforcements for the fighting were three Army National Guard divisions from the United States, Romania was sending a division up from the Balkans and there was also the movement underway from Norway of US Marines & Royal Marines who had fought so land and hard there. This major addition of combat forces was something that Russia wouldn’t be able to match in terms of firepower even with all of their reinforcing reservists fielding what they had. Securing the transfer into the Baltics of these forces was a win for General’s Mattis and Petraeus but these came alongside reverses suffered away from the battlefield where several NATO countries refused permission for their troops in Latvia to continue taking part in the meat-grinder which was the advance. Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Germany and Spain all wouldn’t allow for that to happen. This stance was supported by others who didn’t have ground forces in Latvia in the form of France and Italy with those two nations standing by their allies in objecting to keep on losing so many lives like they were. The Americans, the British, the Dutch and the Poles had all taken great numbers of loses but there was a willingness to continue and go into Estonia. They wanted to get to Tallinn before the end of the month too: October and winter was coming. The others believed it needed to be done by other means rather than keep on doing what was being done.
There were wider matters at play that related to this internal NATO dispute that the news coming out of Latvia were only the spark to set off. First there had been the American bombing of Kiev and then the movement past Minsk further into Belarus. European NATO countries wanted to leave the rest of Belarus alone and turn all attention towards the Baltic. Before anyone knew wat was happening, two separate US Army battalion-level task forces crossed over into Russia proper during the ‘Smolensk raid’. They didn’t get to that city and turned back soon enough but this was an exclusively American matter. There was some limiting of anger afterwards at being deliberately left out of the loop on this when the US Air Force swept into Russian skies and blasted many Russian Army units out in the open following the raid as they came out from cover – which the Americans said had been their intention all along – yet there did remain a lot of bad feeling. From across the Atlantic, there was a lack of understanding on why the Europeans couldn’t ‘get in line’ and back them on what they were doing. Countries like Britain and Poland were playing a bridging role in all of this yet ended up catching flak from both sides of the dispute. This came at the same time as each of them had run up an extraordinary high number of casualties of their own, far more than their allies this side of the ocean.
Operation Baltic Arrow came to a temporary halt. There was still a lot of ‘reconnaissance in force’ as well as air and artillery activity ongoing but the advance was stalled. All those involved on the NATO side, those who wanted to stop and those who wanted to carry on, took the time to reorganise themselves and try to deal with the mass casualties. Russian soldiers kept on digging-in and made their own small-scale forward movements where possible to give their opponents no respite. Those reservists on the frontline had no idea what was going on elsewhere. This was the same with NATO forces in Latvia. The concept that the remaining course of the war, the fate of several nations, was going to be decided not here on this battlefield was currently inconceivable to them.
That was how it was going to be though. Some rather dramatic events and political upheavals were about to happen. A couple of Russian generals in the know waited ready for the deployment of chemical weapons as they had been instructed to be prepared for. They’d been waiting since the Battle of Daugava started and would continue to wait. Such weapons had yet to be used though. Why?
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 10:56:42 GMT
One Hundred and Ninety Nine
The ‘strategic raid’ that had taken place on the soil of mainland Russia had a devastating psychological effect in the Kremlin. The brief but destructive presence of an American armoured battalion on the Russian mainland was just too much for Putin and his ilk to bear. Kaliningrad and Sakhalin were gone, yes, but they were not geographically part of Russia Proper. Smolensk, though, very much was a part of the Russian homeland.
Russia’s armies in Belarus were now gone. Almost to a man, the hundreds of thousands of troops that had gone into battle from Belarusian territory were either dead, wounded, or prisoners in NATO hands. If V Corps crossed the border in force, there would be nothing but militia units to stop them. President Putin called in his closest military and political advisors in the immediate aftermath of the raid. Many, like Director Bortnikov, could already guess what was coming. Though the announcement had not been made, it was becoming clearer and clearer to figures like Bortnikov and General Gerasimov that Putin was losing control.
That could refer to both the situation in Russia and the Russian President’s mental state. When the Security Council met, Gerasimov gave the formal briefing, repeating the dire statistics and facts that he had told the government yesterday and for weeks before that. The writing was on the wall now; Russia had lost, and lost big.
President Putin could not accept that. If he were to surrender, he would surely die, lynched by an angry mob or coldly shot in the back of the head by some colonel who wanted to be a general. Either way, he would be just as dead at the end of it. Losing the war would mean the end of his tenure in office and the end of his life as well. Not just for the Rodina but for Putin personally, World War III had to be brought to a victorious conclusion.
But how? Gerasimov, Bortnikov and others questioned. The Russian Navy was at the bottom of the world’s oceans. Barring its ballistic missile submarines, the once mighty fleet had lost almost every single ship, from battlecruisers to corvettes.
The Air Force had suffered almost as gravely. There were fewer than three dozen combat aircraft left in the arsenal of the Russian Air Force. If the war ended now with no further losses, Russia would be outnumbered by the damned Ukrainians!
As for the Russian Ground Forces…they had been defeated. Bombarded from above and from the ground, there was nothing left bar a few hundred thousand militiamen with old Kalashnikovs and a number of near-inoperable T-55s & T-62s in storage warehouses, with all the men trained to operate them dead or captured.
Little could be done now beyond the acceptance of defeat, the rational amongst Putin’s cabinet agreed. Unfortunately, the man calling the shots, President Putin himself, was quickly becoming irrational.
He talked of a large-scale chemical weapons attack, one which Bortnikov was certain would result in the annihilation of targets within Russia in a storm of nuclear fire as the Americans and probably the British and French too unleashed their atomic weapons in response. There were other proposals debated as well, with one plan being put forward to release anthrax spores into the water supplies of Berlin, London, Paris, Warsaw and DC. Further WMD strikes could be used to take out NATO’s logistical train, the hawks argued, never quite accepting that NATO was sure to respond with its nuclear arsenal this time.
The meeting ended with no solutions found. The Security Council had yet to vote on anything or agree to a proposal. Putin simply dismissed the meeting, promising to ‘do something’.
Two Hundred
The regime of Bashar Assad in Syria hadn’t collapsed but his rule had taken a major hit when a coup d’état had been instigated by a group of senior military officers. They’d failed to kill him yet slain several important figures in his regime. Assad had lost Damascus to them: he’d barely escaped with his life and left many supporters behind. Those involved in that conspiracy against him had afterwards called themselves the Free Syrian Army. They claimed they were liberating Syria of his rule. They’d gone a long way in doing that and were in control of at least a quarter of the nation along with about a third of the surviving military. Assad had rallied supporters and if this was any other time, he would have managed to put the rebellion down. These weren’t usual times though. American and Israeli forces were on Syrian soil and there was too a complete collapse of order where neither his regime nor those hated traitors ruled out to the east near to the Iraqi border. An Islamic insurgency had cropped up there and they were fighting his remaining regime forces, the Free Syrian forces and anyone else in their way too.
Moving his government to the city of Homs, in the west of the country, Assad was unable to do anything substantial to continue the war against the Coalition. The rebels and the Islamists were who the focus was on when it came to the war now. The West seemed happy to keep things that way. Neither the Israelis nor the Americans had withdrawn from Syria, nor had the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon either where they were fighting Hezbollah, yet there were no longer active Coalition military missions beyond those of a self-defence nature taking place against Assad’s Syria. Negotiations broken via the Jordanians and Saudis had seen ‘an understanding’ reached by Free Syria and the Coalition as well. Damascus was no longer under siege and there were unofficial diplomatic missions opening in the Syrian capital. They were talking of implementing Western style Liberal Democracy there! Elsewhere though, the war continued. Assad’s forces were fighting the rebels in western Syria – they were pushing on Homs – while Free Syria was also fighting the Islamists in the east just as elements of Assad’s Syria was in places too. Reports had come to Assad that there were Coalition air strike in support of Free Syria ground forces taking part in that fight.
What had the world come to!?
Assad had no one who could help him. The Russians had been smashed apart here in Syria, elsewhere in the Middle East and in their homeland too. Iran promised fidelity in the fight against the West but refused to act openly. Palestinian forces previously allied to his regime, those not Hezbollah, were striking deals with the Coalition. Turkey was acting as if the last few months hadn’t happened and trying to make up with the West, thus now showing hostility to him. Assad had his army but they had suffered defeat and defections. There had been purges made as more traitors were discovered. With his forces pushed to the west and north of the country, Free Syria grew in strength elsewhere and was taking international legitimacy away. He had worries over the loyalty of his remaining forces as well as the concern that at some point soon, final collapse would come.
At a military compound outside of Homs, Assad took a break from the endless series of briefings covering the ongoing war during the evening of September 18th. He stepped outside. Bodyguards were everywhere and he was safe for assassination…
… or so it seemed.
His thoughts were still on revenge against those who had betrayed him yet before then he was still seeking to reverse the military situation here. He was considering and dismissing ideas aplenty. An idea struck him. This one he didn’t dismiss. He went back inside the compound: the fresh air had helped clear his head and genius had come. Assad almost skipped his way back to the briefing room!
The Americans had a B-2 Spirit in Syrian skies. Intelligence from the ground confirmed the presence of ‘target #1’ based upon an outdoor visual sighting made. From that stealth bomber, eighty JDAM 500lb bombs fell free. It was an overkill indeed but the job was done.
Whatever genius, war-winning idea Bashar Assad had had no longer meant anything for he – and most of his top remaining people too – was no more. The fate of Syria after today would no longer have the influence of Assad within it.
The second ongoing conflict in the Middle East as part of World War Three was the civil war in Libya. Here in the Gaddafi-led nation on the African shores of the Med., it had been a rebellion against the regime first and then the entry of invading armies rather than the other way around as seen in Syria. Gaddafi had lost much of his nation too and had enemies aplenty. No one had came close to toppling him though and while France had made a couple of efforts to kill him, those efforts hadn’t come close.
Libya’s armies had been beaten on the outskirts of Sirte and then the remains pushed back towards Misrata from where they had come. Egyptian tanks and infantry had in recent days taken the city and they were there working with locals who’d emerged declaring that they’d always been against Gaddafi. France, Italy, Portugal and Spain all had troops inside Libya like the Egyptians did but after Misrata, it was the strongest partner nation of the Coalition which took over the continuing offensive driving on towards Tripoli. American ground forces were now fighting west of Misrata around the towns of Mahjub and Zlitan. Those fighting were national guardsmen.
The 36th Infantry Division had been sent to Libya. Part of the wartime-established US I Corps with two other divisions, the 36th Infantry had been detached from that corps command which had been tasked under CENTCOM control to go to Iraq. The initial plan last month had been for the I Corps to go to Europe under SACEUR command like the US IX Corps had been yet violence throughout the Middle East had seen this change in plans. At the Pentagon, Defence Secretary Nunn had wanted American troops to take part in the fighting in Libya rather than leaving it all to allies. This wasn’t a matter of prestige but looking long-terming at Libya with the belief that there would be an Islamist presence here too. There were already signs of that in the east of the country, near Benghazi, but the United States had intelligence that suggested that Gaddafi had unwillingly already surrendered western parts of the country to them. When the time came to fight them, the Americans would be in a position to do so.
Major combat forces assigned to the 36th Infantry came from Texas and Mississippi though there were national guardsmen in supporting roles within the division from close to two dozen states as well as US Army Reserve sub-units as well. The 36th Infantry might have been a second-line unit but it was hardly incapable of this mission of fighting the Libyans. Serving men and women within had fought in recent years across the Middle East in multiple War on Terror engagements. This was different yet it wasn’t like they were going up against first-rate Russian heavy forces. They could handle the Libyans.
Mahjub and Zlitan were won by the national guardsmen.
At the same time, the French were also active where they fought much further inland. They engaged Libyan forces at the crossroads town of Bani Walid. The victory was won a significant distance away from Tripoli, far away to the south, but it was just as important as the fighting which the Americans were involved in along the coast. Tripoli was where the combined forces of America, Egypt and France were eventually going and beginning the process of making sure that when the time came there would be no escape from there for Gaddafi & his forces was underway. Current projections among Coalition planners foresaw a fight for Tripoli beginning at the end of the month. It was certain to be the defining battle of the War in Libya.
Assad’s death and strategic defeats for Gaddafi’s in Libya were important events. They would set in motions events in the Middle East which would play out for years to come with the impact due to fall upon millions.
However, all of that paled in comparison to what occurred on September 18th 2010 when Russian President Putin unilaterally took quite the drastic step to try to avert the course of the wider war.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 11:04:04 GMT
Two Hundred and One
A single SS-18 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM, emerged from a hardened underground silo located on the grounds of Kartaly Missile Field. The orders to the Strategic Rocket Forces for the use of a single strategic nuclear weapon had bene issued this morning, as dawn broke on over Moscow on September 18th. There had been few objections to the ICBM launch order from President Putin; this was because senior figures in the Russian defence establishment had been absent when they were issued.
Putin had vowed in his last meeting that something would be done. Now that something had occurred. He had given a great deal of thought since the beginning of the NATO counteroffensive to the use of nuclear weapons, in both the tactical and strategic sense. Chemical weapons had been used with the Belarusians technically being the ones to deploy them and there were stockpiles of biological agents that could be turned to if the situation called for it.
For the Russian President, it had not been an easy decision to make. When he had made the decision back in July to go to war, Putin had foreseen angry mobs baying for his blood outside of the Kremlin while rebellious military units seized control of the country supported by NATO airpower, after which Russia would be dismembered and her memory condemned to the ashes of history. He had gone to war – willingly started World War III – to prevent that very situation, and now it looked as though something worse was about to happen.
Russia’s armies had been defeated and Russian territory abroad had been occupied before American soldiers had arrived on the soil of the Russian Federation in that offensive from Belarus into Smolensk. Half a million NATO troops were advancing on the Russian border and more were crossing the Atlantic behind them; was NATO planning to drive to Moscow, to depose Putin for itself rather than relying on Russia’s disenfranchised populous?
Yes, Putin decided.
The answer was yes.
This was something to which there could be only one response. Russia’s final option, or rather, Russia’s 4,500 final options, were readied in hardened or road-mobile missile silos, aboard bombers, and in the launch tubes of submarines beneath the Arctic Ocean. Now there was only one option to save the Rodina.
The SS-18 was tracked by Ballistic Missile Early Warning Stations, or BMEWS, at Flylingdales on the northern coast of England and at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland.
A single message was relayed, in code, of course, from President Biden to Strategic Command’s bombers, submarines, and ICBMs. The message ordered USAF B-2 and B-52 bombers to their fail-safe/fail-deadly points above the Arctic Circle, while submarines and missile control centres retargeted their missiles from random coordinates in the world’s oceans (in case of an accidental or terrorist launch) to cities and military bases in the Russian Federation.
Putin had been warned not once but twice that further WMD use, or any sort, would be responded to disproportionately. By the time USAF and Royal Canadian Air Force personnel sheltering deep underground at Cheyenne Mountain, the NORAD headquarters located outside of Colorado Springs, had plotted the approximate course of the Russian ICBM, America’s nuclear forces were ready to strike back.
Where did the missile impact? Not Washington or New York, not London, Berlin, Warsaw or Paris…
It detonated 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, the closest land mass being the Faroe Islands. The 25 megaton nuclear device, the largest in any nation’s arsenal, killed not a single person. Several Danish civilians on the Faroe Islands were temporarily blinded by the blast when they stared directly at it, and a few eve received serious but not life threatening sunburns. Nobody, however, died.
This had been exactly the plan.
From Scotland, Norway, and Denmark, the massive fireball was visible.
How could NATO possibly respond to this nuclear demonstration?
(Transcript of Emergency Action Message from STRATCOM to its forces)
Message Authentication Phrase: DAMOCLES//DAMOCLES
SKYKING SKYKING DO NOT ANSWER
SKYKING SKYKING DO NOT ANSWER
SKYKING SKYKING DO NOT ANSWER
SKYKING SKYKING DO NOT ANSWER
SKYKING SKYKING DO NOT ANSWER
Message Follows:
STRATCOM forces to DEFCON 1. Go//no go codes expected imminently. NCA has devolved launch authority to STRATCOM. Prepare for further orders to launch nuclear strike on Russian Federation targets. WARPLAN SIOP-09-1A. Good luck and give ‘em hell
Message Ends.
Two Hundred and Two
The director of Russia’s FSB, Alexander Vasilyevich Bortnikov, launched what history would call a ‘soft coup’. The victors do always get to write the history books. Such a term to describe what happened following President Putin’s launch of a lone ICBM to frighten and intimidate the West, was rather inaccurate. There was nothing soft about his coup d’état. Violence was involved and it was a true ‘blow against the state’ as in the way it was meant in the French language. The term soft was really used because what Bortnikov did was seen by many as soft. His masculinity would be question and he would be mocked for not just what he did, but what he didn’t do.
This was the second coup in two years which he was responsible for. In 2009, he had orchestrated the deposing of Medvedev at the behest of Putin. Bortnikov had encouraged, planned and executed that act. Now he was responsible for this follow-up one too. It wasn’t as dramatic as the first coup was with far fewer casualties caused. ‘Soft’ it was, just not a soft coup because Bortnikov’s action saw violence happen.
It occurred within the Kosvinsky Mountain complex. This facility was similar to the better-known Mount Yamantau also in the Urals yet more modern. The Russian Security Council had been evacuated here on Patrushev’s instructions ahead of Putin’s nuclear demonstration without informing its members, including Bortnikov, of the exact reason why. Unwilling to just accept that, and watching Putin fully under the control of Patrushev but also Bortnikov’s personal enemy the GRU head Shlyakhturov, he took action. Bortnikov had been making preparations to ‘save’ Putin from his poisonous advisers for some time. On the way to Kosvinsky, he learnt what had been done with that R-36M missile. It had the hand of Shlyakhturov all over it: Putin never would have done that on his own.
There was the additional factor in Bortnikov’s decision where he – and others – had been on their way to that secure site when the missile which NATO called the SS-18 Satan had exploded over the North Atlantic. Putin, Patrushev, Shlyakhturov and General Makarov were all safe.
Everyone else, including he, wasn’t.
Bortnikov had his FSB people at Kosvinsky there as bodyguards for the president. The senior-most officer was a trusted comrade of Bortnikov. He sent him an urgent, eyes-only signal: ‘Da’. The plan was already in-place and the coup took place before Bortnikov arrived. In the confines of the mountains, there were some exchanges of gunfire though in the main armed FSB officers – many of the Spetsnaz personnel – took others by surprise and disarmed them. External communications were shut down using another pre-existing plan, this one drawn up with the innocent notion of preventing a coup… Bortnikov didn’t have time to dwell on the irony of that. He arrived at Kosvinsky only when everything was over.
Shlyakhturov, Patrushev (the Security Council head and one of Bortnikov’s predecessors) and Makarov (the armed forces C-in-C) were all shot on his personal orders along with some lower-ranking personnel among their staffs and also among the president’s. As to Putin, he was arrested. Foreign Minister Kozak and Prime Minister Ivanov, each as well on the plane which brought Bortnikov to the Urals, were likewise taken into custody without having any idea as to what was going on.
Putin’s arrest, instead of death, came as a surprise to everyone. Many thought he should have been shot. Bortnikov was urged to do so – and kill Kozak and Ivanov too – by others but he refused to do so. He explained that the foreign minister could be useful as someone to ‘gift’ to the West while a domestic public trial would await the prime minister. As to Putin… Bortnikov spoke of retiring him somewhat. In a safe place, a secure facility, but not killing him. He had allowed himself to be led astray and had failed the Russian people, Bortnikov said, yet there was no need to kill him.
He did this to win over other members of the Security Council.
All he did was convince many that he was weak: that he was soft.
Bortnikov appointed himself acting president. Defence Minister Zubkov, Emergency Situations Minister Shoygu and Ground Forces C-in-C General Gerasimov all went along with him. He informed them that the (forcibly) retired Lavrov would return to the Security Council back in his old role as foreign minister and that Lebedev – the CIS head, someone cut out of these meetings beforehand – would join them soon enough too. His stated intention to those with him at Kosvinsky was to end the war.
There was a prepared draft of something which he wished to send to the Americans, something hastily added too now in light of the use of that Russian ICBM. Communications connections with the Kremlin were reopened and another FSB man – someone else who had received a ‘Da’ order – reported that there was a waiting message which had come from the United States over the Moscow-to-Washington Hot-Line. Bortnikov had it sent on to him. He sped read through it. It said what he expected it to say. He instructed that his own reply be sent, one which barely addressed the issues in that all-important American communication.
Russia’s new leader – his message said ‘I am in command here now; Putin no longer holds the office of the presidency’ – proposed ending the war with an all-encompassing ceasefire to come into effect as soon as possible: he wanted that to be within the next twelve hours. There would be prisoner exchanges and the release of civilians. War crime allegations were to be sorted out at a later date but apart from what he deemed ‘key regime figures’, Russia wouldn’t be handing anyone over to the Coalition unless Russia alone chose to. Bortnikov proposed that Russian forces would leave the Baltic States and Belarus (plus the sliver of Norway still held) while NATO would withdraw from Kaliningrad and Belarus at the same time. He foresaw a timetable of two weeks here. In addition, in exchange for Russian withdrawals from internationally-agreed Georgian sovereign soil – Abkhazia and South Ossetia –, the Coalition would too pull out of Sakhalin and the Kuriles: a period of four weeks was proposed here.
Bortnikov asked for an American response.
Soon, really soon, there came two responses.
The first, over the Hot-Line, didn’t address his ceasefire offer. The second was physical and took place at a significant distance from Kosvinsky yet not far from Russia’s borders.
In the Gulf of Finland, low over that stretch of waterway with Finland to the north, occupied Estonia to the south & St. Petersburg to the east, four thermonuclear detonations took place. Each had an explosive force of four hundred and seventy-five kilotons.
USS Wyoming, a US Navy ballistic missile submarine, had launched a single Trident D5 missile with MIRV warheads (a second missile was held ready) which had shot out of the Norwegian Sea and released its quartet of warheads up in space. Those descended back down to earth and detonated in a line along the middle of the Gulf of Finland. Each W88 warhead functioned as advertised. There was no aim to kill anyone though there were casualties where several Russian Navy patrol boats and minelayers – what was left of their Baltic Fleet – were in the way. Civilian casualties amounted to a few Finnish civilians too, people out in small craft who shouldn’t have been there.
Again, this was a nuclear demonstration.
For almost a month, the Wyoming had been held ready to do this. She was one of many Ohio-class ‘boomers’ at sea though others had what could be called standard targeting patterns in their databanks ready to fire on Russian nuclear forces and cities too if necessary. Both the French Navy and the Royal Navy also had ballistic missile subs ready for the same mission as the other Ohios. However, with the Wyoming, the targets for her missiles were anything but standard. She had been given a ‘special mission targeting’ role. There had been a concern for some time that Russia might use nuclear missiles of their own in a demonstration role of some sort. Scenarios were plotted out and counters devised at proportionate and disproportionate levels.
It gave Biden ready-to-use options and America’s forty-fifth president – there because his predecessor had been slaughtered by Russian commandos at the very outbreak of war – made use of those with the fire mission sent to the Wyoming.
Within moments of the nuclear blasts, Bortnikov was made aware of them. Information from multiple sources confirmed what the Biden had told him was about to happen in response to Russia’s own action. A second message came over the Hot-Line from Washington. This one was longer though there was some clear evidence that parts of it had been drawn up quickly: naturally, there’d been very surprised on the other end to hear about Bortnikov being ‘in command here’…
…as well as still being unsure if this wasn’t some sort of ruse too.
Stating that they were speaking on behalf of the Coalition, the United States informed Bortnikov that the West had its own terms for ending the war. These were different from his proposal, much different.
Russia’s new leader was watched by the Security Council – previous members missing after his culling of them – as he said nothing and sat with his elbows on a table, head in his hands. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. Soft, they would say, and weak too.
End of Part Nine
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 11:06:19 GMT
Part Ten
Two Hundred and Three
NATO could not politically accept the peace terms that Bortnikov had offered; the Alliance had suffered so much already. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead in Europe and Russia had supported a chemical weapons attack on US forces. European cities had been bombed as far away as London, and the United States had likewise suffered attacks on its own soil. Ships, from aircraft carriers to frigates, had been lost by the dozen. Armies had been crippled by the intensity of the fighting and the sheer number of fatalities and long-term injuries.
A return to the status qo simply wasn’t going to cut it. If NATO had accepted Bortnikov’s peace offer, hundreds of war criminals would have gone free and Russia would have suffered no real punishment, nor would she have born any public war guilt.
Even for the most war-weary nations, this simply wasn’t good enough. The United States, Britain, and France, as the three ‘leaders’ of NATO in both the military and political sense, made nervous inquiries to the more reluctant Allies such as Germany, but even for Berlin a ceasefire on the terms offered by Bortnikov wouldn’t do. There would be no real punishment for Russia in the eyes of many. It was true that Russia’s military had effectively been destroyed and the capital city repeatedly bombed, but for a vengeful NATO this wasn’t the same as Moscow accepting war guilt.
Before the Allies were willing to seek peace, Russia – whoever was in charge – would have to accept responsibility for its actions as a nation. More than that, President Putin would have to face criminal charges for his actions in the West. All of NATO agreed that it would have to be an international trial with no possibility of the death penalty, even countries such as the United States that planned to execute several Russian military personnel found guilty of war crimes. There were many other figures that would have to publicly face the consequences of their actions, but Putin was key amongst them, and Bortnikov couldn’t let that happen if he wanted to rule Russia after the war; not with all that Putin new.
Until somebody came to power that was willing to hand over the disgraced Former President, now sitting in a lonely cell of Lefortovo Prison awaiting his fate, NATO wouldn’t be willing to bring a halt to the wholesale destruction of the meagre remnants of Russia’s armed forces.
Two Hundred and Four
Bortnikov’s reign as the leader of Russia lasted barely two days. The short period was a time of great strain for the nation and its leadership. It came to an end when on the morning of September 21st he was deposed.
From a Kremlin window, Bortnikov was thrown to the ground below.
The act of defenestration – done in true Bohemian style it could be said – didn’t kill him. The fall was only from four stories. He was on the ground outside in the rain and still alive. The best medical care might have saved him though he certainly never would have walked again and been left with life changing injuries. Those who did this to him had orders to cause his death by a fall from a window of height. They could have gone outside, taken him back in again to the room from where he had been thrown and repeated the process. The prospect of that was too much to stomach: the mess outside was quite a bit to have to deal with. Disobeying orders to make this look like a suicide, one of the military officers involved in deposing Bortnikov leaned out of the window – being careful not to fall! – and fired a three-round burst from an AK-74 he had taken from one of the sergeants with him who had done the ‘heavy work’ when it came to the defenestration. Those shots would kill Bortnikov instantly.
The King Is Dead! Long Live The (new) King!
Between his violent assumption of power and his death, Bortnikov had faced revolt to his rule. He was a true usurper. There was no legitimacy to his presidency after he deposed Putin. This might not have mattered if Bortnikov had been able to use his force of personality to enforce his rule but he was lacking in that department. The appearance of the weakness he had shown in not killing Putin had only rapidly grown when he had done nothing after the American’s gave their own nuclear demonstration in reaction to Russia’s similar act. When he had presented his terms of arranging a ceasefire & armistice with the Coalition had summarily rejected, Bortnikov had no fallback plan. Those who had supported him turned their anger against him for failing to live up to his promises. Key figures such as General Gerasimov, Shoygu and Zubkov realised their mistake. From outside the Bortnikov-reformed Russian Security Council, the opposition was present and strong right from the start. Russia was a federation made up of multiple entities. There were semi-independent republics (based along ethnic lines) with their own presidents, oblasts and krais: the latter two being federal subjects along regional lines with their own leaders & legislatures. From across Russia, there were barely a few messages of support to his leadership. Everyone else was opposed to him and this included the President of Tatarstan who promised open revolt. Russia’s federal parliament had been turned into a rubber-stamp for Putin’s authority and there was no mood there for Bortnikov. The Russian people weren’t suddenly going to embrace the leadership of the nation’s senior-most secret policeman. The officer ranks of the armed forces didn’t fall in-line either: they too had no love for the siloviki anyway and especially not this particular weak chekist.
The first violence in opposition to Bortnikov came from the GRU. General Shlyakhturov had been among the first killed at the Kosvinsky Mountain complex but his organisation, Russia’s military intelligence apparatus, didn’t crumble and neither were its senior people running around like headless chickens. The GRU’s deputy head, General Sergun, at once started to prepare for a counter-coup to depose Bortnikov and his FSB cohorts. It was foreseen as a difficult process and Sergun was self-ware enough to know that he didn’t have the force of personality to lead Russia after Bortnikov was gone, but he got the process underway regardless hoping someone would follow his lead and act. GRU men started killing FSB people in clashes across Russia. Bortnikov had come to Moscow and set himself up in the Kremlin but he ruled over a country on the path to civil war. His regime was at once on shaky ground with all of that opposition vocal and now violent. There was no course of action presented to those who came back from Kosvinsky with him as to how to end the war. They had supported him because that was what he had said he could achieve.
Bortnikov failed to deliver and paid for it.
Gerasimov launched a second coup d’état. He had the support of the senior surviving Security Council figures such as Shoygu and Zubkov as well as externally from Sergun plus contact with domestic political figures. The GRU support was key to making it all work though Gerasimov, named by Bortnikov days beforehand as the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces after the shooting of General Makarov at Kosvinsky, would have done it without them if he had to. Moreover, he probably would have fought the GRU too. The situation got that bad with war continuing in the form of Coalition – especially American – attacks on the Rodina and the fear of civil war. Bortnikov had to go or it would be the end of them all. He sent a detachment of committed personnel to the Kremlin to take it and kill Bortnikov – the Kremlin’s guards were withdrawn in a secret deal and only armed FSB people were there –, who reported success, and gave Sergun military support as the GRU went after the FSB elsewhere. They did the military’s dirty work for them in wiping out people thought either loyal to Bortnikov (not a big number) or those who would oppose their rule too.
Putin was ‘rescued’ from Lefortovo Prison by Spetsnaz in GRU service. He was there under a different name and drugged to keep him quiet. FSB officers were gunned down by the Spetsnaz – including those who had surrendered – and Putin bundled aboard a helicopter. A return to the Kremlin wasn’t on the cards for him though. Sergun orchestrated a video recording of him in his ‘poor condition’ with ‘ill health’ apparent (this would all be digitally manipulated) and then he was taken to a GRU detention facility down in the southern regions of Russia. He’d fulfilled his need.
Once everything was completed, Bortnikov killed and the FSB put down, General Gerasimov came to the Kremlin. He took the oath of office there. Again, he was an usurper with no legal nor democratic legitimacy just like Bortnikov had been. However, he had an alliance behind him and was fast to make sure that he would win as many people over as possible… those who wanted to resist his rule would find that violence would be used against them quickly. It would be discreet and targeted too with none of the hesitancy, none of the softness & weakness, that Bortnikov had had before he ‘jumped’ from that window.
Those two days of Bortnikov’s rule saw the war with the Coalition continue onwards. Each side had used nuclear weapons though not directly against each other. Hot-Line messages had been exchanged yet no agreement had been made to stop the ongoing fighting.
In Latvia, where NATO’s armies had seen recent victory, but a rather costly one, the advance there on to Estonia was stalled. Artillery and air strikes took place while reorganisation was made of NATO forces. The Americans moved up their national guardsmen with the US IX Corps ready to go forward with their existing troops in-country along with those from their allies who their governments would give permission to advance too. Everyone else would stay behind if they had to. The plans were for a renewed attack to begin in a week’s time, going forward against dug-in Russian reservists who would be blasted out of their positions just like anyone else. Down in Belarus, there was further securing of parts of that country which remained unoccupied by American, French and Polish forces involved in the push eastwards. The Russian-Belorussian frontier wasn’t to be crossed again but advances were made elsewhere. In the very northeast near Vitebsk, and down in the southeast around Gomel, there were Russian troops and also those Belorussians loyal to the captured Lukashenko. Engagements were fought and the US V Corps emerged the winner of each of those. Nearly all of Belarus was in Coalition hands and this included the entire frontier with Russia now. These advances created a strategic situation on the ground which General Mattis had his CJTF–East planning staff look at with the possibility of a later advance should he be given orders to undertake: by attacking across Russian soil, northern Latvia and all of Estonia could be liberated from behind and even St. Petersburg reached should Mattis get a go-order on that.
Russia came under renewed air and missile attack with strikes taking place against what could be called ‘semi-strategic targets’. The Americans only – their allies urging caution – launched cruise missiles from ships and dropped guided bombs from strike aircraft flying above the Rodina. They hit military industrial targets in various parts of the country. Several factories which manufactured combat aircraft, tanks and other weapons, plus shipyards too, were hit. Many of these had been attacked before. The worries of allies were that following the use of nuclear weapons in demonstrations, this all could cause a miscalculation and lead to a real nuclear strike. The Americans continued with them though, telling their allies they were being careful. The reason why this was done was stated by Washington to other capitals to keep the pressure up on Moscow though there was another angle to it which the Joint Chiefs had argued in talks with Nunn and Biden to see them done. The thinking among those senior military men was that Russia was going to throw the towel in. There was a short timeframe to do them more damage before the fighting ended. Plenty of ALCMs, Tomahawks and the latest of the JDAMs had been used up during the war already, lowering numbers of war-stocks immensely, but some had been held back ‘just in case’. The just in case was undefined but it was seen as occurring now. Serious damage was done at multiple sites which Russia would have an arduous task of ever repairing.
In the Barents Sea, that Russian Kilo-class submarine which had previously done so much damage in the English Channel turned up here. RFS Vologda was on its way home, heading back to Northern Fleet bases bombed repeatedly by Task Force 20. Those facilities along the Kola Peninsula were being hit once more by the US Navy using aircraft-dropped bombs and Tomahawks as the Vologda approached. A flash radio message from one of the few operative radio sites ordered the submarine to attack the Americans no matter what her situation was with a low weapons load. This was done. A frigate and a destroyer were hit (neither would sink) and then the Vologda moved in against one of the aircraft carriers: the USS Enterprise. The submarine attempted to put a hole in that vessel too. If it did, US Navy air operations would be seriously disrupted and a famous victory won. Alas, no more did the luck of the Vologda and her crew hold. The Belgian Navy sunk her… the Belgians of all people! They had one of their frigates with TF 20 as a recent addition for anti-submarine work after the BNS Louise-Marie had spent many weeks in the North Atlantic. The Russian boat closed in on the carrier which the Belgians were defending and torpedoes were launched into the water from the frigate. First one and then a second struck home. There would be no surviving crew members to pull from the sea. Every Belgian sailor who was in the company of American naval service-personnel for the coming decade would declare that they were aboard the Louise-Marie that day and seek to be brought a beer (or several) for saving the Enterprise from surely ‘a certain sinking’.
Gerasimov sought to lead Russia as a post-war military strongman. He had shown off his credentials by launching a war on the FSB and seizing the Kremlin: the underhand kidnapping of the family of the commander of the guard force to force his men to withdraw ahead of the attack wasn’t mentioned in that narrative. As a strongman, he acted whereas the weak Bortnikov had done nothing. Like the man he had killed though, Gerasimov had said he would end the war with the West.
That he set out to do.
Rather than using the Hot-Line and its email set up, Gerasimov contacted Biden directly. He had a phone call made to the White House where he requested to speak to the American president. This took time and he was frustrated with the delay but he got through to his opposite number in the end. There were many people listening-in on the line and they spoke via translators on either end yet it was the best direct person-to-person contact that could be made short of the two men being in a room together.
A ceasefire and follow-up armistice was requested. Gerasimov stated that he was willing to accept the conditions expressed by the Coalition. He asked how soon the end to the fighting could start
“Let’s stop the fighting and save the world”, he told Biden.
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 11:08:14 GMT
Two Hundred and Five
The terms minimum terms at which NATO would accept peace were harsh ones at best. General Gerasimov, in his role as ‘acting president’ found himself first negotiating a ceasefire with NATO before a more finalised peace agreement was reached. Taking place within hours of his coup against Bortnikov, Gerasimov ended the immediate hostilities in his phone call with President Biden in the United States. Across Belarus and in Norway and the Baltic States, the guns finally began to fall silent as NATO forces received the following message;
“Cease all hostilities. Maintain defensive posture.”
The relief in the air was palpable. It would take until nightfall for the fighting to finally cease completely, but for the first time in many months, soldiers on both sides could stand up outside of their foxholes while civilians could sleep in the relative certainty that no nuclear warheads were going to come falling down onto them in the dead of night. Celebrations ran wild throughout major Western cities at the end of the war; the city of London, for example, was reported to have actually run out of alcohol on the first night of the ceasefire. Though the claim was somewhat exaggerated, it was not far from the truth, with the story much the same in France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Even in Poland, where thousands had seen their loved ones and friends perish, there were wild celebrations.
With the ceasefire now in effect, President Biden could begin formal negotiations to end the war. The terms he gave Gerasimov were these;
1) Withdrawal of Russian military forces from abroad and from occupied territory. This included Russia's bases in Armenia and on the Ukrainian-ruled Crimean Peninsula as well as in Central Asia. Russia would also have to pull forces back from South Ossetia and Akhbazia and cease its support to the seperatist movements there.
2) Acceptance of war guilt by the Russian state.
3) Turning over of former President Vladimir Putin for an international trial on the following charges. Russian war crimes included; Starting a war of aggression; deliberate targeting of civilians; cruel and inhumane treatment of POWs; use of chemical weapons (by proxy); taking of hostages, and using civilians as shields.
4) Demilitarisation of Kaliningrad.
5) No Russian involvement in the affairs of post-Lukashenko Belarus or the post-liberation Baltic States.
6) No Russian membership of any military alliance whatsoever without approval from the UNSC for the next ten years.
7) Release of all POWs from Russian custody.
8) Reparations to be made in the form of oil and natural gas shipments to European states.
In return, NATO would grant the following;
1) Return of Kaliningrad and Sakhalin to the Russian government.
2) Release of all POWs not charged with major war crimes.
3) No renewal of offensive operations against Russian forces.
Begrudgingly, Gerasimov accepted the peace terms offered to him. He had expected NATO’s demands to be harsh, but as harsh as this. Despite arguments against it, he ultimately was left with no choice when the United States threatened once again to renew operations and destroy whatever was left of Russia’s military and civilian infrastructure. However, Russia did ‘cheat’ on several of the terms. A number of NATO prisoners in Russian custody, those in specialist fields who the GRU believed would hold long-term value, were simply ‘lost’ in the prison system, never to be released in case they could be of use later on.
President Putin would likewise never make it to NATO territory. Plans were already being set into motion by NATO to have the Russians hand him over in Berlin, but before this could happen the former Russian President suffered a fall down three flights of stairs while being moved from his cell (on the second floor of the prison complex he was detained in) to the dining area (only one floor below). During the alleged ‘fall’ Putin suffered a broken back, nose, leg, and both arms, along with several cracked ribs and severe internal bleeding, the last of which killed him within hours of the incident. Tomorrow, a meeting would take place between SACEUR and his Russian counterpart to formalise the peace, and NATO troops would have to secure the Baltics against remnants of pro-Russian separatist groups and militias, but it looked as though the fighting was over with, for now.
Two Hundred and Six
There had been a verbal agreement between Biden and Gerasimov when it came to Putin. The deposed Russian president would be joining his counterpart who used to rule Belarus at an international war crimes tribunal: Lukashenko and Putin were envisioned to be side-by-side in the dock at a trial in The Hague. Then Putin had his fatal ‘accident’ before he could reach Coalition custody. Only a fool would believe the accident story… but there are many fools. The murder of Putin would just be the first, though the most high-profile, of figures who would suffer a demise before they reached a public punishment that the West would like to see done. Part of the reason for Kremlin-ordered killing was to silence these people yet another factor was that Gerasimov didn’t want the Russian public to be later treated to images of once-powerful Russians being paraded as prisoners by the victorious Coalition. The Rodina wouldn’t stand for the humiliation, Russia’s new leader believed, and would extract their revenge upon those who allowed it to take place.
Fatal accidents, apparent suicides and disappearances which took place among key people came alongside other violations of the spirit of the arrangement between Biden and Gerasimov. There was no written agreement yet made but the American president and his Russian counterpart had struck a deal. Gerasimov took the opportunity presented to have things done to save what was possible despite that. As the fighting came to an end with nothing concrete confirmed on what would happen next, Russian forces did things they were unable to do when the conflict was raging. Transport aircraft landed in Estonia, the Crimea and Kamchatka: Coalition fighters would previously have blown them out of the sky. There was destruction of equipment and infrastructure that Russia looked likely to lose once a written agreement was made. A lot of this was seen by Coalition reconnaissance assets and strategic intelligence means. There were urging made to political leaders across the West to do something to stop this.
The war was over with though.
To confirm the end of the conflict, a physical meeting took place where a ceasefire would be signed and armistice arrangements made: a final peace deal wasn’t something that was going to come as quickly. Contact was made between Nunn and Zubkov as the US Secretary of Defence and the Russian Defence Minister where they exchanged messages over the Hot Line to set this up. At midday on September 22nd, two Russian Army helicopters arrived at the grounds of Vilnius University in Lithuania. Few of the buildings here had seen war damage and it was a secured area. There were Canadian troops here, men from the Primary Reserve serving with the 32nd Reserve Brigade–Group, who had been transiting through Lithuania yesterday when the fighting stopped and were diverted to Vilnius to provide security. The pair of Mil-8 helicopters were ‘escorted’ in by US Army Apaches – with French Rafales in the sky as well – and once they landed, from out of one came Colonel-General Khrulyov. This general officer, the man who’d taken Tbilisi and arguably set into motion the chain of events leading to this war, had recently been named the Western Front commander: the Russians had gone through three previous commanders before Khrulyov. SACEUR also arrived by helicopter. General Petraeus flew in on a Blackhawk and had his own airborne escort with Apache gunships too, though that had been rather friendly unlike those which had been with the Mil-8s.
The meeting between Khrulyov and Petraeus was short. Through interpreters, their meeting went on for less than an hour. Each of them were following political guidance though SACEUR was here on behalf of the Coalition – close to fifty nations now, all who wanted to have some input in what happened at Vilnius – while the commander of the Western Front was representing Russia alone. Despite all of those issues with many Coalition desires, the shortness of the meeting and the lack of any major disputes came because there had already been much agreement made by political masters. There was a document which was signed and an armistice would come into effect. This superseded much of what had been said before in political contact and made everything official when it came to bringing an end to the war.
It was all over officially at two o’clock in the afternoon, Eastern European Time (GMT +2). For almost twenty-four hours beforehand, there had been a distinct lack of gunfire throughout all regions of the war as the unofficial ceasefire rolled into effect – a few flare ups had occurred though – but after this, there was supposed to be no chance of further outbreaks of fighting.
The Vilnius Agreement covered many issues.
Russian forces cut off behind the frontlines where they ran through Latvia and into Belarus would all surrender themselves into Coalition custody with immediate effect. There were many pockets of resistance though none of them really had significant numbers of active personnel: regardless, the men inside them would surrender and turn over all weapons & military equipment. This would be repeated at the very top of Norway and also in areas of Georgia. On the Russian side of the frontlines, there would be withdrawals made out of Norway, Estonia, Latvia and the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia & South Ossetia by Russian military forces starting today and to be completed within five days. They would only be allowed to leave those areas with their own military equipment and not allowed to take with them any spoils of war. Fighting had already ceased on Afghanistan’s borders with Russian-aligned Central Asian nations and then with air & sea combat elsewhere around the globe but this made all of that official too. When it came to Estonia and its capital, Russian forces were to leave there within eighteen hours. A minor point of contention had arisen between Khrulyov and Petraeus over what exactly constituted Tallinn when it came to the area around that city, but they eventually went with the Estonian government definition of the city for electoral purposes. Russian forces were to be out before NATO troops began landing there.
Methods for the transfer of POWs and detained civilians were agreed to. The Coalition wanted everyone back and would only afterwards discuss addressing the issue of anyone Russia accused of war crimes: they would then decide later on whether any of the allegations made had merit with international trials to be undertaken, not Russia-located ones. It was the same issue with those the Coalition accused of war crimes: Russian nationals would face international justice unless there were specific circumstances such as some of those that the France, Poland and the United States had in custody (with the Americans, that was the Obama assassination team). Each side held many other POWs as well as civilians who weren’t subject to these levelled charges against them. Retuning them to the other was something that was easier to agree to though going to be very difficult to achieve physically with the speed desired. The logistics of transfers were arranged with medical cases being at the top of the list. At the suggestion of Khrulyov, Petraeus gave his consent to an immediate exchange of a select number – they shook hands on the figure of one thousand patients (half each) – of badly wounded POWs to occur starting at midnight through Daugavpils in Latvia. Further exchanges of medical cases and others would take place at agreed locations down the Belorussian-Russian frontier over the coming week. Following what Gerasimov had conceded on in talks with Biden, the Coalition would retain a certain number of senior Russian military officers for the purposes of Russia showing ‘good faith’. These weren’t those accused of war crimes and would only be kept for a few months but many colonels and every general held by the Coalition weren’t going home yet. What these exchanges of personnel didn’t cover was Belorussian military personnel nor armed civilian militia in custody unless the latter were Russian nationals. With the former, the Coalition considered Belarus a failed state so there was no one in charge there to yet arrange a return of POWs with. As to non-Russian militia prisoners, they were being currently treated as ‘Unlawful Combatants’. There were those detained in the Baltics, in Belarus, in Transnistria and in Georgia. Their future was one which Russia was entitled to have a say in unless it could prove that they were Russian citizens.
Further matters discussed at Vilnius concerned Russia providing information of where unexploded ammunition, mines and other leftover dangers of war could be found in areas to come back under Coalition control but also elsewhere such as at sea. Bodies of prisoners who had died in the custody of each side were to be returned. Should there be knowledge of where each side knew the remains of military personnel lay and those were in inaccessible areas –mainly at sea – that information would be shared as well. The biological weapons leak, which the Coalition wouldn’t accept any responsibility for despite a missile strike being the direct cause, would be addressed by a joint Russian-Coalition military effort due to its spread over the areas of five countries now: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. They would work together on the clean-up and sharing of information. There was also the issue of Russian sovereign soil which the Coalition would withdraw from: Kaliningrad, Sakhalin and the South Kuriles. Demilitarisation of the first of these was key to what Biden and Gerasimov had discussed but before then there was the agreement put on paper of the removal of Coalition forces from each of these places. The Pacific territories of Russia would see Coalition forces leave within six weeks with a gradual return of Russian military forces to each made during that process. Kaliningrad was going to be turned over to Russia within two months though with a delay of half of that time before any Russian civilian law enforcement personnel could arrive to establish order. There would be no military presence allowed to be re-established and the Vilnius Agreement contained ‘penalty clauses’ within it for any Russian violation of promises on that: the penalties would mean continued Coalition military presence.
Khrulyov and Petraeus chose the location of Balbasovo Airfield to be where their subordinates would meet after Vilnius to discuss ongoing matters relating to the armistice. There would have to be further talks to resolve any problems with ongoing issues and things which popped up unexpectedly. Later prisoner exchanges past the initial ones would occur here in Belarus outside the city of Orsha. This facility was near the Russian border and Khrulyov said that it was heavily damaged by NATO air attacks but Petraeus told him not to worry about that: again, the future of Belarus was in Coalition hands now. SACEUR had some of his people there already, he told his opposite number, and they reached an agreement on what form Russian access with (unarmed) military staff officers would have there including the logistics of setting up a liaison team there with Russian attendees.
There was a short media event – invited journalists and no questions asked – once the agreement was signed though that actual physical act wasn’t something recorded to be broadcast around the world. Gerasimov had refused to allow that done, something reaffirmed by Zubkov over the Hot Line and then Khrulyov in person. Biden would soon catch a tremendous amount of backlash for allowing for Russia to hold out on that matter with the criticism at home but more so abroad. Gerasimov got his wish though: he didn’t want the Russian public to at some point see that humiliation occur with their own eyes. Afterwards, Khrulyov left Vilnius. There was a problem with one of the helicopters though he took the other Mil-8 out of Coalition territory – leaving staff officers behind to go out by land if that helicopter wouldn’t fly – and headed home.
Surrenders started talking place of encircled Russian forces behind the lines and there were instances at sea of a couple of Russian submarines surfacing in areas which caused the Coalition some alarm. With the latter, two of the trio went home but the third sailed for Gibraltar. Distress calls were made from the boat where the captain claimed several serious medical emergencies aboard. A Royal Navy frigate, joined by a Portuguese frigate afterwards, responded to this. An armed escort was provided. Contact came from the Spanish who wanted to know whether it was a nuclear-powered boat – it was – and whether it had any nuclear weapons aboard – no one knew – because the Russian submarine was heading for Gibraltar. A diplomatic incident began between allies. Onboard the submarine, there was no intention to surrender but rather offload casualties from an accident to where the lives of sailors could be saved. However, at the behest of the War Cabinet in London, orders were sent outside of the NATO chain of command to HMS St. Albans: seize the submarine. Royal Marines aboard from a detachment of the Fleet Protection Group (once known as the Comacchio Group) did so with the dubious excuse of the Russian Navy breaking ceasefire terms here. They hadn’t but it would be hard for anyone to prove otherwise… until the British newspaper The Guardian did two years later.
There were defections from Russian military personnel in many areas. Hundreds of conscripts, reservists and officers abandoned their posts and headed for NATO and Coalition lines following the Vilnius Agreement. Their fate, along with other wartime deserters & defectors, would cause issues later down the line with Russia wanting them back and the Coalition refusing to hand them over. Elsewhere, there were localised, unauthorised ceasefire violations which continued into armistice violations. They took place in many places with each opposing side being guilty of them. Provocations were made, it was said, and the other guys had fired first too. Much of this occurred in the Caucasus. American and Georgia forces with the Allied II Corps fought Russian soldiers who’d changed out of their uniforms to fight as militia but also many ‘locals’ as well. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were being abandoned by Moscow but not everyone wanted to see that done. The Georgians weren’t prepared to see a slow Russian withdrawal – they’ll heard that story before! – and found excuses to carry on with the war in those breakaway provinces until they were conquered and returned to their ‘rightful’ owners.
There was fighting in Tallinn the day after the Vilnius Agreement too.
A week beforehand, the US II MEF had left Norway – the Germans were there with the Norwegians fighting the last of the Russian holdouts – with SACEUR intentions to send them to the Baltics once the last of the extensive sea minefields had been cleared. Plans were in motion for a forced landing into Estonia when the fighting stopped. That amphibious assault was due to occur in the northwest, at the edge of the Gulf of Finland. American and British marines would have landed at Paldiski on the shoreline and inland at Amari Airbase before moving on Tallinn from the flank and behind. It would have been a hard, bloody fight. The amphibious ships weren’t yet in-place, the demining hadn’t finished and little on-the-ground intelligence gathered by Force Recon marines. However, the II MEF went to Estonia early. Flown by Luftwaffe, RAF, US Air Force transports rather than US Marines assault helicopters, the 2nd Marine Division sent its first wave to the international airport: within the city limits. Russian forces had left a few hours beforehand. Royal Marines followed them with transport flights but also coming off HMS Ocean which was out in the Baltic; more US Marines came off American amphibious ships too once they had sailed north along a route which the Russians said was mine-free.
At an agreed upon location on the edge of the city, a party of Russians were met. They still had forces in Estonia outside of the capital which were all soon to leave. The Russian Airborne Troops officers were all armed: a violation of the armistice. Questioned as to why this was the case by the US/UK military liaisons who met them (themselves well-armed) the Russians pointed to the gunfire in Tallinn that could be heard. That wasn’t Russian soldiers fighting NATO’s marines. Groups of armed militia – some Russian-speaking Estonia, some Russian nationals and some Slavic foreign volunteers – were engaging those who’d arrived to liberate Tallinn. Officially Russia had washed their hands of them and those liaison officers even helpfully provided a little information on where they could be found and what weapons they had, but, unofficially, those militia had been pre-warned of the incoming NATO forces and there had been several caches of weapons ‘lost’ by the Russian Army which had found their way into their hands. The war was over but the Coalition was fighting armed enemies in Tallinn.
This would continue here in the Baltics plus also in Belarus and in the Caucasus for some time to come with fighting undertaken by armed irregulars & committed terrorists. Moreover, the conflicts in Libya and Syria weren’t finished either.
Yet, as said, the war itself was over. World War Three had come to a conclusion.
NATO and the Coalition had won; Russia had lost, decisively so too. Putin was dead and Lukashenko was in custody. Russia had survived but its allies such as Belarus, Transnistria and the Georgian breakaways hadn’t. The global effects were immense. Casualties, military and civilian, were in the hundreds of thousands while there were millions of refugees (temporary and permanent) in wide areas. Biological weapons hadn’t been used purposely but had been released; chemical weapons had been deliberately employed. Worse than any of that, there had been ‘demonstrations’ made with nuclear weapons.
But it was finished.
End of Part Ten
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James G
Squadron vice admiral
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Post by James G on Jul 27, 2019 11:10:23 GMT
Part Eleven
Two Hundred and Seven
The end of World War III, while being marked with celebrations, gave way to a turbulent and dangerous world. The global economy was in utter ruins, destroyed beyond repair as a result of the conflict. When European politicians had decided that they would rather see their nations brought down by debt than the treads of Russian tanks, it had left the Continent shattered. A recession struck with a vengeance in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, echoing the troubles of 2008. This was caused by the wartime halt on civilian shipping through the Atlantic and various regions of the Pacific Ocean as well, by the end of Russian gas and oil supplies to Europe, and by the global terror felt at the prospect of a nuclear exchange. While Armageddon was averted in a physical sense, the after effects of so many close calls were still felt despite the promise of economic reparations from Russia to Europe.
Despite the economic chaos and the ongoing fighting in the Baltic States and Belarus that lasted until the end of November as the last remnants of pro-Russian militia groups were wiped out by NATO occupation forces, Russian and NATO POWs were handed over. At least, the vast majority of them were; this began properly in early October as the Russian MVD began escorting groups of prisoners from their Gulag style labour camps back to the Estonian and Belarusian borders by road and rail.
In a few cases, US Air Force C-17s landed at a number of airfields in the Russian Far East to retrieve prisoners being held there. Most Russians in NATO custody were handed back over as well, but the Spetsnaz men captured in the United States were executed following their wartime tribunals for their involvement in numerous war crimes while evading US forces. France and Poland likewise retained a number of commandos caught on their soil in foreign uniforms or after killing civilians, keeping them back for what was sure to be a lengthy series of trials and tribunals.
There was to be an unimaginable amount of international bickering with regards to war crimes trials following the end of the fighting, but the successful prosecution of Alexander Lukashenko not only for Belarus’ war crimes but also for participation in Russia’s war of aggression and the suppression of internal dissent brought an end to many of those concerns. Lukashenko was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and began his sentence in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison in July of 2011. Many Russian war criminals, almost all of them military officers captured during the fighting who had been discovered to have killed civilians, allowed abuse of civilians in occupied territory, or abused prisoners of war, faced the same fate as Lukashenko did.
Though the United States called for an American-led trial where Lukashenko would face the death penalty, this was rejected by the European community despite all that they had lost in the war. A major cause of dissent within the United States was the release of a handful of Russian bomber pilots captured in the United States; many wanted them to be shot, but lengthy investigations by the JAG corps of the US Army and that of the Air Force showed that no crimes had been committed here; prosecuting those Russians while American pilots who had bombed Moscow and St Petersburg were allowed to go free would have shown hypocrisy, and the post-war Biden Administration was attempting to portray itself as a government of moral principles.
Like World War II, the Third World War was seen by an overwhelming majority in the West as a justified struggle against an invading enemy. Those who saw the conflict as a display of Western imperialism were few and far between, with the arrogance of their arguments pointed out daily by television pundits. Few dared to oppose NATO and the Coalition’s role in the conflict, although some more serious criticism did arise about the Coalition’s interventions in the Middle East and the necessity of that, especially in Syria, when it came to defeating Russia. Likewise, the Coalition’s admittance of dictatorships such as Egypt was bemoaned.
The nuclear close calls that had occurred during World War III failed to prevent nuclear proliferation around the world; North Korea expanded its nuclear arsenal as Iran was accused of seeking to gain an atomic weapon. Several close calls occurred throughout the end of September and October 2010 as General Gerasimov found himself confronted with the fact that Russia’s only defence against a renewed NATO offensive or an attack from the lengthy Chinese border was now his nation’s nuclear arsenal.
While instability continued throughout the world, the end of WWIII did produce a huge number of effects regarding popular culture. Films, books, music and television shows about World War III became mainstream, some better than others. The new wave of war films, including hits such as Zero Dark Thirty, a relatively realistic depiction of the US-run Operation Midnight Talon in Libya, became especially popular, as did miniseries’ such as HBO’s The Darkest Night, which discussed the conflict from the point of view of the US Army’s 77th Armor Regiment, earning critical acclaim alongside Generation Kill as the most realistic depiction of combat ever seen on television. Musicians turned their focus to the war as it occurred and afterwards as well; the Green Day album ‘When the Jackboots Come’, telling the story of a young enlisted soldier from a small town in the American heartland, was one of the most popular ever released and was later adapted into an award winning film, while Radiohead’s cover of Nena’s 1980s-era anti-war song 99 Red Balloons, released three days before the war as a result of the crisis, likewise became an instant hit.
While the War of 2010 was reflected in fiction, it had very real consequences all around the world.
42,000 American servicemen and 2,100 civilians had perished, while 9,000 Americans had endured barbaric treatment while in captivity. In Russia, the numbers were far higher. 239,000 military personnel had been killed and another 90,000 captured, while over 10,000 Russian civilians had lost their lives either in air raids against the Rodina itself or when caught up in the fighting in Kaliningrad and Sakhalin. Poland had seen 26,000 of its soldiers die, along with 57,000 civilians, most of them at the hands of cluster munitions, thermobaric weaponry and other hi-technology weapons of war. Over 8,000 Polish soldiers had been taken as POWs and a further 5,000 civilians had simply vanished into thin air while in Russian captivity. Britain was mourning the 9,000 servicemen and women and 549 civilians who had been killed. Over the 3,781 British troops thought to have been captured, 2,401 returned home at the end of the war. The figures for Germany and France were much the same; thousands dead and thousands more captured or badly wounded. Norway had seen its military suffer heavy casualties, while brave civilians caught behind the Russian lines had acted as partisans or assisted those who did, with grave consequences to themselves.
With the average age of the American soldier being just 21, a whole generation had seen its ranks decimated by World War III. For the generation known as millennials, often criticised by some of their elders as lazy and work-shy, World War III had been the defining event of their lives. Even those who hadn’t seen combat in the military had seen bombs fall on their homelands and faced the constant, nagging terror of nuclear annihilation for three months. Hundreds of thousands had flocked to recruiting offices while others had gone to war as volunteer aid workers helping to assist in the rebuilding of Belarus, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.
The consequences of one man’s decisions would of course be held in the minds of millions, but even with the Third World War now a piece of history, there would be other wars.
Two Hundred and Eight
The armistice signed in Vilnius didn’t cover the conflict still raging in Libya. Gaddafi was completely taken aback by the Russian decision to end the war like they did: admitting that they had been defeated. He had only expected Russian victory if not under Putin or even Bortnikov then Gerasimov. What he decried as a betrayal stunned him. He and his regime had bigger problems though. Even without the ending of combat operations against Russia, Libya was doomed in fighting the Coalition. What occurred in Vilnius sped things up. In the following days, though still keeping an eye on Russia less that all be an unexpected ruse, NATO transferred air assets to Italy and also occupied parts of Libya too. There was a switch of overall command for them from SACEUR to CENTCOM yet this was a war being fought by the Coalition, not just NATO. It would take longer to move troops and warships but their preparation for movement was underway. When it came to boots on the ground, knowing that American & European reinforcements were on their way meant that CENTCOM could do more now without having to worry about reserving strength. The Egyptians too were eager to get things finished.
The Tripoli offensive got going. Libya’s army – what was left after the Battle of Sirte – didn’t stand a chance. The French moved in from the south while the Egyptians, with American national guardsmen under operational command, made an attack from the east. Libya’s capital was entered on September 27th and declared clear two days later. A couple of Gaddafi’s sons were captured – dead or alive – in the final series of engagements but Saif and Khamis plus their father were missing. The younger Khamis, wanted for serious war crimes, turned up in Tunisia and would be handed over within weeks but where had Libya’s deposed leader and his eldest son gone? Everyone was looking for them. Breadcrumbs were followed and those led to possible exits into inland West Africa. There were several countries to where they could have gone to seek safety, taking stolen wealth with them too. For years, Libya had aided those nations. However, despite efforts to find shelter in them, there had been rejections of pleas for asylum. Gaddafi and his son would only bring those countries trouble. It was to Sudan where they both ended up and Sudan had no intention of handing either over to the Coalition or the international community.
Following the Libyan War, there was a strong Western military presence for the following months. Regime hold-outs were targeted and to were Islamists who tried to launch an insurgency against ‘crusaders’. This was dealt with harshly. Political will in Europe faded for a continued occupation and it was the same in the United States. The Egyptians would be in the new year leading an Arab League mission to secure Libya and build a new country here… reaping many rewards in the process too.
An offer by neighbouring countries and fellow Middle Eastern regimes to provide an Arab League peacekeeping mission to Syria was rejected by the new regime in Damascus. This was a polite refusal. The generals signed a withdrawal deal with Israel – the Americans departed as well – and in the process threw Hezbollah in Lebanon to the wolves: the full might of Israel doing as it wished there. Free Syria (the name was still being used) finished off the last of Assad loyalists and also ‘pacified’ the coastal regions where the Assads and their Alawites followers had once had their power base. Asma Assad – wife of the deceased Bashar – and her three young children were reported last seen at Latakia before they disappeared from the face of the earth: Bashar’s brother Maher, a ruthless general who’d led the Republican Guard in the final battles of the dying regime, was afterwards seen in Jordan and he would survive the loss of his family’s regime. There was an unofficial coalition which Free Syria did join though, one which included non-Coalition Middle Eastern nations plus some Western nations. American, French, Egyptian, Saudi and Gulf Arab forces fought against what became known as the Islamic State. This terrorist entity with ambitions of a Caliphate had risen in Iraq during the Third World War and sought to expand itself afterwards. Free Syria fought them exclusively on the ground in Syria, in Iraq it was several nations and in the skies it was a free-for-all. Through the rest of 2010, all of 2011 and into early 2012, this new war would be fought until a final battle in Mosul was won with Islamic State defeated.
Turkey had withdrawn from NATO but sought to re-align itself with the West after Russia’s defeat. The process started before Vilnius but accelerated afterwards. There were strong feelings involved though due to how Turkey was regarded by many as siding with Russia rather than taking a true neutral stance… but also walking away from its supposed allies too at their time of need. Things would change in mid-2011 when President Gül deposed Prime Minister Erdoğan and had him arrested. The charges concerned alleged domestic corruption and abuse of powers though that was just a smokescreen. The real issues were more complex and to do with ideology. Gül would then try to bring Turkey back to where it had been before. This wasn’t going to be easy: it could take a decade or more. Meanwhile, Turkey would join with the Egyptian-led invasion of Sudan in 2012. The regime of al-Bashir was brought down by Egyptian tanks in Khartoum following several years of disputes leading to armed conflict. America and the West weren’t directly involved – Egypt had other allies beyond Turkey – but did assist in several ways especially when it came to locating certain figures there. Gaddafi was finally caught with a return to Libya for ‘justice’ though his son remained a fugitive. Sudan, under Egyptian control, would see the southern half of the nation cleaved off into an independent nation while the rest would soon be economically & militarily tied to Egypt for the foreseeable future.
Europe had been ravaged by the Third World War. The conflict had been felt across the continent, even through neutral countries too. The post-war global recession hit hard. There were internal refugees from the east and there had been major disruption to trade among those in the western half who found this the lifeblood of their economies. Environmental concerns due to the nuclear explosions and possible contamination from radiation among sunken submarines was there too. War damage from air & missile attacks left unexploded ordnance alongside the physical destruction of war which likewise was continent-wide. This was worse in Poland and the Baltic States though the Russians had struck everywhere they could manage when possible. Defence budgets needed increasing to pay for replacement equipment & personnel while there was infrastructure costs on top of them. Political upheavals were seen in Eastern Europe first in the Baltics with new governments, then Poland as well before economic factors saw changes in the following years among ruling parties. The EU was hit with many challenges and it was that institution which many turned to. However, while the EU was needed to put Europe back together in the eyes of many, others recalled the utter failures of pan-European diplomacy to avert war – an unfair belief – and then there was the fact that it had been NATO and the Coalition which had triumphed in conflict. Finland and Sweden, EU members but not in the EU, were angry at how their partners ‘hadn’t stopped’ the Americans from denotations nuclear weapons so close to their countries and leaving them exposed to radiation. Disputes raged on the need for further integration of military forces within the EU when NATO had shown its true worth.
Post-war, NATO announced the establishment of permanent bases in Poland, the Baltics and Belarus too. The latter country had a big UN presence for nation-building but the United States, Britain, Poland and others all had military forces there. In the Baltic States, other facilities opened to support a deployed garrison which was envisioned to stay for a long time to come. It was NATO which was at the forefront of the April 2011 naval stand-off with Russia. Before being forced from office, Erdoğan had allowed for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (their only surviving naval surface fleet) to leave that inland sea and cross the Turkish Straits. These Russian warships headed for the Baltic and the Barents Sea. No naval restrictions had been placed on Russia with the Vilnius Agreement – a major error – and Gerasimov wanted those warships elsewhere. There weren’t that many vessels and their value was nothing more than symbolism in reality but this brought about internal European tensions on what to do here. The Russians went across the Med. and onwards. The navies & air forces of several nations stood ready to blow them out of the water; other countries were fearful that this would shut off deliveries of Russian oil & gas. It was 2010 all over again! The Danes were the ones who finally took the lead in this. They built a consensus to stop those ships with a blockade. Denmark remembered vividly what had happened the year before when Russia had ships in the Baltic. Danish warships joined by the Royal Navy, the Dutch, the Poles, the Norwegians and soon enough the Americans too stopped them with a physical blockade. The Russians went to the Kola Peninsula in the end, struggling to get there, and Moscow raged about NATO aggression. There was no shooting though, the oil & gas deliveries would continue and Copenhagen wouldn’t see Russian warships sailing past that war-ravaged city.
The changes in government make-ups first seen in Eastern Europe were then repeated in Western Europe. There were many factors at play and country-specific circumstances. However, many of the wartime leaders left office in 2011 and 2012. President Sarkozy survived (despite the damaging statements which came from Gaddafi in Khartoum about how he had previously bought the presidency for Sarkozy) but Chancellor Merkel didn’t. Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain also saw new leaders. It was a time of much change.
The British wartime government wouldn’t survive the post-war world either. The Cameron-Clegg coalition of Conservatives & Lib-Dems would fall apart in 2012 leading to a general election and Labour’s David Miliband entering Downing Street. The whole situation with this was messy. There were wartime tensions within government over casualties suffered with blame apportioned to poor decision-making and then post-war economic woes as well. The government had been intending to bring in the Fixed Term Parliament Act to stop unexpected general elections but this, and so much more, never came to pass. Emergency budgets were followed after the war and as part of the 2012 one, there would be another increase in military spending. Britain had a lot to replace in terms of lost equipment during the war. A dispute arose over how the MOD ‘protected’ its budget against costs incurred from wounded veterans. Those costs were passed onto the NHS and they were quite significant. Modern warfare saw casualties occur like every war yet advances in medicine meant that there were proportionally more survivors of their injuries. Horrible wounds, physical and mental, had been suffered to many and the MOD didn’t want to shoulder the costs of these when it needed new tanks, new aircraft, new ships and new bases (in the Baltic States). The Lib-Dems refused to accept this ‘attack on the NHS’. The Labour opposition – under Miliband who’d won the delayed party leadership election – took advantage and there was a political row which caused a public outcry. Alerted that the vote could go their way, even getting Conservative rebels as well as seeing the Lib-Dems split, Labour called a vote of no confidence. Many Conservatives abstained: they intended to see Cameron fall & replaced without a general election. After he lost that vote though, the PM went to the people. Clegg was knifed in the back by his own MPs (metaphorically) and the general election was a disaster for the two governing parties. Miliband won a majority, a small one but a majority none the less.
The political drama in 2012 came after several years of Britain hurting post-war. The outpouring of patriotism during the conflict fell away afterwards. There was still a little but not enough. The country had watched on the news several Royal Navy submarines coming home flying Jolly Rogers – shadows of the Falklands there – but then there were the (delayed) official releases of casualty figures. These had been effectively hidden from the general public during the war for the sake of public morale. The numbers of dead and injured were huge. So too was the scale of those ‘missing’. Some were sailors lost with ships & subs or aircrews while others were soldiers whose remains weren’t located on battlefields. However, there were POWs who never returned from Russia with their fates unknown but suspected to be a shallow grave somewhere in Siberia. Civilian deaths had occurred in Britain and once more there were missing with this too. The remains of a few people wouldn’t be found due to legitimate causes yet there were others. What had happened to them? The suspicion was – one later proved – that they had been killed on British soil by Russian espionage & commando activities when they stumbled across activities with their bodies disposed of. Why would the government cover this up? They did so because they were stupid and made an error there which shouldn’t have been done over wanting to maintain secrecy. When the fates of such people were revealed – with all remains still not located – this became a national scandal when it was ultimately avoidable. The nation watched transfixed on the news as the bodies of two (photogenic) young teens were recovered near an RAF base in East Anglia. Outrage and calls for ‘action against Russia’ were made despite this occurring several years beforehand and the whole story not known. There was also the issue of female POWs who did return to Britain. What happened to them was covered up in Whitehall at first as well. Part of that was for privacy concerns (they were sexual assault victims and that was the law), another reason was for military morale. It all came out in the end. This was an issue that the Americans too were facing with all of those horrible stories to be told so it was wider than Britain but that didn’t change the fact that the British public reacted negatively to having this hidden from them.
The London Olympics took place soon after Miliband assumed office. They took place at a time when Britain was said to be devoid of hope by media commentators. The games were a low-key affair with cost-cuttings made due to the terrible economic situation the country faced. The downcast face the country presented to itself and the world would eventually pick up but not until the next year, even beyond if truth be told. A victor of the Third World War, many people would saw that Britain looked like a loser of that conflict. There were other domestic issues rumbling too: Britain’s future within the EU and also desires north of the border for independence from Scotland. The future wasn’t looking that bright despite efforts to make it that way.
General Gerasimov fixed an election and made himself Russia’s legal president. He made significant changes to the constitution too, robbing the country of a lot of its real elements of democracy as the ongoing ‘emergency measures’ were now made permanent. There were protesters on the streets of Moscow – and elsewhere – and they were met by soldiers. After shots were fired, the people fled. The West didn’t see this on the television screens like they had before but what happened was known about. Like many things, the Vilnius Agreement didn’t mention anything about what Russia could do internally when it came to politics and law enforcement. Gerasimov put in-place a military dictatorship and no one could nor would do anything about it.
Talks went on for several years as to a final peace treaty to settle the end of the war. Vilnius had been an armistice, not a peace. However, due to the scale of what was agreed there plus when Biden and Gerasimov had personally agreed upon with the preceding ceasefire, bringing about that peace treaty was something that could be delayed in such circumstances. The delay went on and on. Russia honoured Vilnius in the majority of it, at least in public anyway. Moscow cancelled wartime deals with China over military technology transfers and also disestablished many of its bi-lateral and multi-national security partnerships. Gerasimov nationalized the country’s oil & gas industries to stick to the agreement to pay reparations through subsided sales of those hydrocarbons. Whereas before the oligarchs had raped Russia’s resources, now it was the turn of the military to do this. Russian tensions with China were dramatic at times and there was also that naval stand-off with Europe. However, in US-Russia relations on strategic matters, there was a summit – Biden and Gerasimov meeting face-to-face – on nuclear arms reductions which went well with real agreements made on the issue of such weapons.
There was fighting in the Caucasus and in Central Asia which Russia officially had no part of. Russian volunteers went to those conflicts though with many of these being veterans of the war against the Coalition. Throughout Central Asia, where the worst of this was, the regimes there among allies Russia had abandoned faced rebellions & insurgencies. The war which Russia had first dragged them into had seen their economies collapse and the fragile ethnic situations break. It was a right mess. Gerasimov worried over China intervening but this didn’t come to pass due to their own troubles at home. Meanwhile, while avoiding these wars, Russia was in several ways preparing for another possible war in the coming decade. Gerasimov set himself the task of rebuilding the Russian Armed Forces. The Vilnius Agreement had put military restrictions on Russian deployments to Kaliningrad (which Russia regained) and also abroad but nothing was said about what could happen in Russia proper. War damage was immense and the scale of the defeats massive but Gerasimov gave it a go. What a challenge he faced! He took it on though, believing that one day soon Russia would have to fight the West once again for current unforeseen circumstances. NATO watched from afar, sure that Russia wouldn’t be able to do it… not after all that had been done to them.
In the United States, there was a major intelligence shake-up postwar and also a push to replace elements of the armed forces lost in war. The latter didn’t just include new equipment – tanks, aircraft and ships (including a carrier to replace the one lost) – but also personnel. Significant losses of men and women had occurred. The mobilised Reserves & National Guard were kept in federal service for nine & six months respectively. There was a major recruitment effort made as well, especially among those who’d signed-up during the war. The United States would keep a military presence in Europe. The Eastern European garrisons established in the Baltic States and Poland were there to stay for good while those in Belarus and Romania, as well as Georgia in the Caucasus, were expected to be in place for a few years at least. For decades since the Soviet Union had fallen, the Americans had slowly been pulling out but now they returned in strength. Relations with Russia were still strained despite some good progress and the NATO countries in Eastern Europe wanted this presence. Russia had pulled what was left of its armies back but they could always return.
The United States faced recession like elsewhere in the West. A boom in military production couldn’t stop this. The global economy had been hit hard. There were efforts made to address this from the White House. Critics of Biden said he should go protectionist but he tried the opposite approach. The United States had long-standing economic & trading ties with Europe, East Asia and China. There was anger in Washington at Japan’s behaviour during the war with its neutrality and that turned to rage when misinformation – lies – came that Japan was reaping the rewards of the war in trade with America. The Biden approach to China brought even more controversy. China, another neutral, had been unofficially on Russia’s side during the war and was also seen as being behind North Korean attempts at ‘adventurism’ too. The US Ambassador to China resigned during those postwar talks, disagreeing with the White House. Biden needed trade with China though to help fix US domestic economic issues. He was in the middle of fighting dissent at home when unrest hit China. They were suffering from economic problems too, not helped by Russia going back on its word and all the wartime disruption. Chinese civilians rioted in several cities and the situation got a little crazy for several months during late 2011 especially. There were talks of the regime falling before China brought in the tanks to ‘restore order’. The trade talks were suspended amid the international outrage and the recession wasn’t going to end due to this. Biden’s enemies said this was a problem of his own making.
Whereas Britain had been rocked by revelations of wartime secrets coming from newspapers being leaked damaging information, the United States faced something worse. A website called Wikileaks, established long before the war, would see a flurry of activity and attention. Leaks of secrets were made to them and they published them globally. A huge amount of secret information was put out for all to see with nothing redacted. The ramifications were domestic and international. The head of that organisation, an Australian named Assange, was snatched by the CIA in a ‘black operation’ when accusations surfaced that some of this was coming from Russia too – which Gerasimov gave a refusal on – but this didn’t stop those leaks. It was Americans themselves, angry at their government for wartime and postwar activities, who wanted to share this with the world. America’s relations with allies in Europe but also those in the Middle East – who they were fighting Islamic State alongside – came under much strain.
The 2010 mid-term elections in the United States, coming only weeks after the war ended, were won handily by the Republicans. Biden’s Democrats took major losses. It was said that this was a long time coming following an Obama backlash but that president was long buried and Biden was in the White House. The Democrats were hit the following year by more revelations about those illegal donations from Russian oligarchs pre-war as well. The Republicans were on the march. They took it to Biden, accusing him of betraying America’s veterans and not fixing the economy. His other problems with China and also American inaction when it came to Sudan didn’t help. The president was asked repeatedly if he intended to run for the presidency in 2012. This was a question not answered by him nor his spokespeople. The situation wouldn’t be resolved with Biden unsure. Eventually, a couple of mid-ranking Democratic Party figures broke ranks with the president and announced that he was damaging the party: if he wasn’t going to run, they would. No big hitters jumped in straight away yet there was blood in the water and the sharks were circling. This went on and on. It damaged relations with allies and foes alike as Biden looked weak. His poll numbers were terrible and the negative aftereffects of the war kept on coming. In September 2011, he finally addressed the issue. He wouldn’t be running for election in fourteen months time.
His fine speech about instead intending to serve out Obama’s term and honouring the legacy of his slain friend was remembered by few. All attention went elsewhere onto who would run instead. Secretary of State Warner was one of the big-hitters who did declare but Vice President Kerry would confirm several days later that he would run for the presidency and the momentum fell behind him. Primaries took place the following year and Kerry won out. For the Republicans, Romney was an early favourite but then Huntsman entered the race. He was that ambassador who resigned from his post in Beijing, a Republican appointed there by Obama. Neither man excited the party base, especially the recent Tea Party movement that had started out opposed to Obama before turning on Biden’s wartime & postwar presidency. Huntsman beat Romney and it would be Kerry vs. Huntsman in November 2012. Pundits were at a loss to say who would win with both seen as having significant weaknesses with neither going to bring in high numbers of votes like Obama had done in 2008. An October Surprise came though. Osama bin Laden, #1 enemy of America even after the Third World War, was hunted down and killed while hiding in Pakistan. He’d been near forgotten about but the ‘victory’ won there – credited to Kerry when it was Biden who was responsible for all that happened – was seen by analysts as enough to push Kerry over the line. He won the White House with Biden due to leave office the following January.
In Russia they were building tanks; in America they were about to get their third president in less than three years.
The End
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