Russia Debuts New, Sleek Force in Crimea, Rattling NATO
Crimea’s lesson…
As the Ukrainian crisis unfolded over the past month, Russia’s military staged unprecedented maneuvers all along the Ukrainian frontier that experts say showed a new level of speed, agility, and tactical integration among the different branches of the armed forces. In early March, Russian special forces surprised observers again by mounting a lighting fast operation that effectively seized the Crimean peninsula, virtually without casualties, despite the fact that some 18,000 Ukrainian troops were stationed in the region.
There seems little doubt that the West is rattled. On Wednesday NATO commander General Philip Breedlove warned that some 40,000 Russian troops deployed near the border could roll over eastern Ukraine in “between 3 and 5 days,” even though experts say that Russian military doctrine would call for a force of at least 100,000 to accomplish that task. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted Thursday that such rhetoric was over-hyped, and that Russian troops were being gradually withdrawn from Ukrainian border areas. He added, though, that Russia had the right to post troops anywhere on its own territory.
The operation to seize Crimea, which began just over a month ago, offered a dramatic illustration of the Russian Army’s new capabilities. In the space of a few hours on March 1, hundreds of Russian special forces - bearing no identifying insignia - landed in Crimea and fanned out across the peninsula, seizing road junctions, airports, railroad terminals, administrative buildings, and also keeping Ukrainian military personnel bottled up on scores of bases around the territory. Journalists covering that operation focused on the Kremlin’s fairly transparent lie that those “little green men” weren’t actually Russian soldiers.
“The fact is that US and NATO intelligence were completely outwitted,” Mr. Baranets says. “There was a cover operation, in which Russia had mobilized about 150,000 men from the Baltic to the Urals for war games, and all [Western] attention was focused on that. The true objective was hidden in the shadow of those exercises.”
More: Russia Debuts New, Sleek Force in Crimea, Rattling NATO