generalspeaking

His Personal Coliseum

"These events add up to a highly disturbing picture of violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided midair collisions, close encounters at sea, simulated attack runs and other dangerous actions happening on a regular basis over a very wide geographical area."
"To perpetuate a volatile standoff between a nuclear armed state and a nuclear armed alliance and its partners in the circumstances described in this paper is risky at best. ... It could prove catastrophic at worst."
"[The episodes had brought] a higher level risk of escalation [from maneouvers, including] harassment of reconnaissance planes, close overflights over warships, and Russian 'mock bombing raid' missions."
"[Three events] carried a high probability of causing casualties or a direct military confrontation."
European Leadership Network report

"The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some are even saying that it's already begun."
Mikhail Gorbachev

Those three events that so gravely impact the potential for conflict? A Scandinavian passenger jet en route to Rome leaves Copenhagen with 132 passengers aboard, and a midair collision with a Russian surveillance plane that failed to transmit its position was narrowly avoided by a particularly alert Dutch air crew.

In the Stockholm archipelago, a Swedish commander is on the prowl to discover the whereabouts of an unauthorized underwater vessel, vowing to use armed force in response to its presence. Provoking "the biggest antisubmarine operation in Sweden since the Cold War", causing Vladimir Putin no end of entertainment as he serenely denied any Russian subs in the vicinity.

The yet unrestored abduction of an Estonian intelligence officer two months ago when an officer, part of the Internal Security Service, the national Estonian agency for counterintelligence and corruption investigations, leaving a security checkpoint after investigating an incident on the Estonian side of the Luhamaa border checkpoint with Russia was violently abducted in an operation that saw the Estonian Public Broadcasting communication jammed and smoke grenades set off during the abduction.

And while Estonia has called upon Russia to investigate the situation and see to it that the Estonian officer is returned to Estonia, Russian President Vladimir Putin blandly states he has no knowledge of the situation whatever. This incident took place, just incidentally, in the wake of President Barack Obama on visiting the region gave U.S. security assurances to the Baltic states, concerned over the issue of growing Russian volatility.

There were close to forty incidents in the past eight months involving Russian forces in a "volatile standoff" with the West, according to the episodes chronicled in a report and released by the British non-profit research organization, the European Leadership Network. All of these events were said to have taken place since Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Which brings to mind the belief in crime-solving circles that even the slightest of misdemeanors must have the discipline of follow-up and punishment attached to them, since if they are considered too slight to be bothered with, the perpetrators assume that no criminal acts they involve themselves in will be punished. Although the accession of the Crimean Peninsula, yanking it away from Ukraine is hardly a slight occurrence, apart from censure, no punishment of any note resulted for Russia.

The resulting number of events and their increasing gravity involving Russian forces had NATO officials citing three times as many intercepts of Russian aircraft as in all of 2013 by October of 2014. Warplanes of the British royal Air Force were scrambled, responding to the presence of "multiple Russian aircraft in international airspace", in June.

The latest: At the very time that the Security Council and Germany are negotiating with the Islamic Republic of Iran over its controversial and threatening nuclear program is being brought to the finish line, Russia has signed a deal with Iran to build two new nuclear reactors and has as well agreed to expand the total number of Russian reactors in the country to eight, according to the state nuclear agency Rosatom.


Iran, it seems, plans to build 20 more nuclear plants in the future, including four in Bushehr, to decrease its dependence on oil and gas. This anxiety to turn away from dependence on oil and gas leading to the necessity for increased nuclear plants is rather puzzling in view of the incontrovertible fact that Iran is an oil-producing country, reliant on its fossil fuel resources to fuel its economy, but yet now eschewing the use of the very products that have made nuclear installations financially feasible...?

Labels: Belligerence, Conflict, Controversy, Europe, Russia

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 12, 2014