The crisis in Ukraine has turned into a war of nerves between Russia, which according to NATO is preparing the largest maneuvers on Belarusian territory since the Cold War, and the United States, which today began deploying a new contingent in Eastern Europe.
Hours following the Russian Su-25 fighters landed at an airfield in Brest, a Belarusian region bordering Ukraine and Poland, the first plane with US soldiers arrived in the latter country.
The US has decided to increase its military presence on NATO’s eastern flank by 3,000 men, reinforcements intended to deal with the 130,000 Russian soldiers concentrated on the Ukrainian border.
Fighters In Belarus, Troops In Poland
The Su-25CM squadron traveled more than 7,000 kilometers from the Russian Far East to participate next week in the joint military exercises “Allied Determination-2022”, which have aroused the suspicion of NATO.
The military statement did not specify the number of the Su-25s, but on Belarusian territory there are already a dozen Su-35 fourth-generation fighters, in addition to S-400 Triumf long-range anti-aircraft defense systems, which also arrived on Friday. to Brest.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg denounced that Moscow will also place the feared Iskander tactical missiles in the neighboring country, capable of overcoming the US anti-missile shield, although the Russian Defense Ministry has not reported this.
According to the White House, Russia has already deployed 5,000 Russian soldiers on the border between Ukraine and Belarus, and plans to increase that number to 30,000 men.
Instead, Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei replied that “the fantasy of military aggression from the territory of Belarus once morest Ukraine is simply ridiculous.”
Poland, one of the biggest adversaries of Russia and allies of Ukraine, will receive almost 2,000 US soldiers between today and Sunday, while the rest will be stationed in Germany and Romania, a country bathed by the Black Sea.
Although the Pentagon specified that these soldiers “will not fight in Ukraine”, it did not rule out sending more men within the framework of the Atlantic Alliance’s containment plan.
Change of speech, the invasion is no longer imminent
After more than two months of deafening war drums, all the parties involved seem to have changed their discourse in recent days. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is no longer imminent. The theater of war is no longer the battlefield, but the halls of diplomacy.
Although he continues to ask the West for weapons, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba admitted that the number and composition of the military forces deployed by Russia on the border “are not sufficient for a large-scale invasion.”
He was seconded by White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who publicly called for the word “imminent” to be erased from the vocabulary of war reports.
Meanwhile, from Moscow, Vienna or the UN, Russian diplomats describe a war with Ukraine as “inconceivable” and accuse the West of devising an apocalyptic scenario and blaming Russia for carrying it out.
That was the Kremlin’s reaction when the US news agency Bloomberg mistakenly published a story this morning titled “Russia invades Ukraine.”
“This is a magnificent demonstration of how dangerous is the situation created by the endless aggressive statements coming from Washington, London and other European countries,” said Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman.
Peskov warned regarding the “irreversible consequences” that “the atmosphere of extraordinary tension” that exists in Europe can have.
The Coming Diplomacy
Neither Russian politicians nor analysts expect the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, to withdraw his troops from the border soon, since such war games do not represent a great economic cost and are an ace in the hole in security negotiations with USA and NATO.
In addition, no one puts their hand in the fire that the threat of a war in Ukraine has disappeared, even more so when the conflict in Donbas between the Ukrainian Army and the pro-Russian militias has never ceased since 2014 despite repeated ceasefires.
The Russian órdago is still on the table. In addition, Putin received on Friday the support of the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, in his confrontation with the Western powers, which both called to abandon the ideology of the Cold War.
For this reason, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, will travel to Moscow on Monday to meet with Putin and call for a de-escalation in exchange for the start of a negotiation on the new security architecture on the continent.
And next on the list will be German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is being pressured in Berlin to abandon the “change through trade” policy towards Moscow as obsolete.
