As Russian war material pours into Belarus for training exercises along the Lithuanian and Polish borders, the U.S. State Department has announced the evacuation of the embassy in Minsk, reducing the staff down to only critical personnel. The Russian exercise, called United Resolve takes place as the NATO exercise called Allied Spirit is underway in Europe.
While these exercises could be nothing more than routine military training, both sides of the conflict eye them suspiciously as possible pretexts for actual military action.
A day ago, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of landlocked Belarus announced that if neighboring Lithuania does not allow cargo from their ports destined for Belarus to transit through their country then he would take immediate retribution without defining precisely what that could be.
Meanwhile, in the United States, multiple military units have been placed on standby for deployments to Eastern Europe.
The 82nd Airborne Division has an Immediate Response Force capability that has been alerted. The IRF has seen rapid deployments to Iraq and domestically to the Washington D.C. area in recent years.
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IRF1 is currently ready to go at a moment's notice, and a source speaking to Connecting Vets on the condition of anonymity said that the division has pooled all of their Russian speakers to go with IRF1.
However, it remains unclear what the plan is if Russia invades. By some accounts, American soldiers would not deploy to Ukraine but rather to Romania, Poland, and Hungary, watching the war unfold and merely containing it.
What this demonstrates is that at stake is not only Ukraine but all of Eastern Europe with America and allied forces believing that Russia is not just interested in Ukraine but rather engaged in a much larger political project across post-Soviet space.
This of course puts Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia in an unenviable position to say the least as America's commitments are openly questioned.
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The current stand-off over Ukraine is the largest military mobilization in Europe since the Cold War, with Russia having some 127,000 troops massed on its western border.
Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
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