Ruminations: Russian Imperialist Ambitions : Encirclement Paranoia

"I think people need to know Russia is not this benign thing. They want to dominate Europe, they want the United States to not be a great power any more ... America can't survive losing its allies in Europe."
"People need to understand what this means."
"[The MAGA movement Trump leads is] obviously penetrated by the Russians."
Jeff Nyquist, writer, geopolitics blogger

"[The group's analysis is] pretty good."
"Their work is extremely, extremely useful if it gets published because it's a way of telling the Russians 'We see you. And whenever you move, we know where you're going."
"NATO does not pose a military threat to Moscow but] you cannot express this to a Russian, who has an ingrained paranoia about encirclement. This is not new."
"This is centuries old, this fear of being encircled."
Frederic Labarre, expert on NATO-Russia relations, professor, Royal Military College

This handout satellite image released by Maxar Technologies and taken on Nov. 1, 2021, shows tanks, armored personnel carriers and support equipment amid the presence of a large ground forces deployment on the northern edge of the town of Yelnya, Smolensk Oblast, Russia.

Using commercial satellite images, a group of private intelligence analysts has assembled a graphic illustration of the Russian military buildup on NATO's Eastern flank. Training sites, oil storage areas, anti-aircraft missile launchers, amphibious vehicle testing ponds. And nuclear-tipped missiles that in mere minutes could reach the capitals of Western Europe. Sobering at the very least.

Last month in Toronto, the group presented a video illustrating the evidence they discovered, to the Mackenzie Institute think tank, providing an overview of the heavily armed Russian presence close by the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Finland in the hopes that their research might impress authorities in North America whose focus has been on the Russian conflict in Ukraine, while missing what Vladimir Putin is scheming more generally in eastern Europe.

In scrutinizing the evidence presented, Professor Labarre of Royal Military College was not impressed with the military equipment Russia has stationed close to NATO member countries considering it to be of poor quality; not the kind of preparations consonant with an imminent invasion. He interprets the presence there of the Russian military to be preparatory for a vigorous defense based on Russian misconceptions relating to their presumed intentions of countries to its West.

For his part, Nyquist is concerned with what he interprets as a troubling new direction by American conservatives, once hawkish on the Russian threat; the MAGA movement, he is convinced, has been infiltrated by Russian agents. A perception perhaps linked to PresidentTrump's having been seen to court his Russian counterpart while attempting to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, as well as halting U.S. military aid to Kyiv directly from the U.S.

Russian military buildup on NATO’s Eastern flank revealed through satellite images

The group's impression of Trump accommodating himself to Russia and China consolidating their near geographic dominance, giving impetus to his own intentions as laid out in the recently published National Security Strategy to gain complete control of the Western Hemisphere, and to that end capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for starters, leaving the impression that others like Colombia and Cuba may be next -- setting aside his intense interests in Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada's Arctic.

"We are Russia's next target."
"Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe."
"And we must be prepared."
Mark Rutte, NATO secretary general

"Some military historians even believe we have already had our last summer of peace", stated German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius as he warned of Russia's preparations to invade other European countries. Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk blamed a rail-line sabotage, drone incursions and the torching of a shopping mall, on Russia: "We will accelerate the building of the strongest army in Europe", he said in preparation for ongoing aggression. A number of other European countries were faced with mysterious drone activities around their airports, all attributable to Moscow.

Within the investigative group, Lee Wheelbarger, a one-time senior technologist with the U.S. Army, has been studying Russian military movements for over a decade, his results posted on his KLW News online video channels, collecting publicly available images from commercial satellites. Images from ground cameras are also accessed by Wheelbarger and his group colleagues. Another video method helps him glean information from sources globally.

Photo taken by bystanders of Iskander intermediate-range ballistic missiles on a highway 19 kilometres from the Polish border during a Russian military exercise in Kaliningrad last year. The Iskander is capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads. The photo was obtained by a group of private analysts documenting Russian military buildup in Eastern Europe.

The group has ascertained evidence enabling them to reach certain conclusions:

A major expansion of military installations in Kaliningrad with an enlarged command centre, new missile storage facilities and a reconstructed nuclear-weapons depot;
A recent lengthening of a runway at a Kaliningrad airfield lined with fighter jets and supersonic bombers where a storage facility for SS-27s, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles is located;
Numerous trips by airliners into Kaliningrad from the Russian far east, night and day, suggesting an influx of troops;
In Belarus, scores of S-400 anti-aircraft missiles and launchers are stationed. A train from China delivered military hardware to a Russian base in Belarus...SS-27s stored 64 kilometres from the Latvian border.

Poland, they observed, has recently-added defences along its Kaliningrad border of concrete 'dragon's teeth' and tank ditches to thwart armoured vehicles. The capture of the Suwalki Gap along the Polish-Lithuania border to cut the Baltic states off from the rest of NATO is arguably the most likely move by Russia were it to invade NATO territory, Nyquist posited.

For his part, Professor Labarre, characterizing Russia as a "very nasty neighbour" with imperialist ambitions, downplayed the significance of its military hardware positioned adjacent to NATO-member borders.