More On Possible Threat To Estonia

Another article from PJ Media on Estonia and Russia: "Will the U.S. Send Troops to Die for Estonia? Putin Doesn't Think So." A few points from the article:

    It's eerie how Putin appears to be rerunning Adolf Hitler's playbook of bombast, bluff, probe, and testing the adversary before unleashing his armies. Like Hitler, he has spent years conducting a "shadow war" or hybrid/gray-zone warfare to weaken NATO's resolve. This has included directing arson attacks against warehouses, defense production plants, and logistics hubs servicing supply chains to Ukraine across Poland, Germany, Britain, and the Baltics, as well as the physical disruption, arson, and signal tampering along critical transport corridors, such as Polish rail lines transporting aid and civilian traffic. Russia is also suspected of severing undersea cables and sabotaging underwater pipelines.

    There have been Russian airspace violations of Poland, Lithuania, and Romania. There have been strategic overflights, "accidental" missile or drone crashes near border areas, and fighter jet incursions testing NATO air-defense response times. NATO's feeble responses have emboldened Putin to the point that he now appears ready to stage the ultimate test in the alliance's 80 years.

    Putin now has 100,000 troops massed on Estonia's border and will attempt to call up another 300,000 reservists. Putin has manufactured a crisis about "ethnic Russians" being oppressed in the border city of Narva. He wants Estonia "to grant regional autonomy to the “Narva People’s Republic” — a breakaway statelet purportedly declared by Estonia’s Russian minority, but which in reality has been invented by the Kremlin, then mercilessly promoted on social media," writes UnHerd's Michael Kranz.

[snip]

    Like any good performer, Vladimir Putin has read the room and already knows NATO's response. Donald Trump is not going to ask American boys to die for Estonia, no more than he asked American boys to die for Ukraine. He will not send troops to defend Poland, Lithuania, Romania, or any European country, seeing the defense of Europe as a European matter. 

Although the U.S. is looking at pulling 25,000 troops from Western Europe, I suspect that Putin may have misread the room. It is notable that Lithuinia is receiving a new rotation of American troops--an armored battalion, so not a huge number--but not nothing. Nevertheless, the Russian threat is likely more nuanced than a full-out invasion of the whole country. Rather, as Stars & Stripes, reports, "Russia could test NATO’s bedrock collective defense pledge by sending a small number of troops to seize a sliver of Estonia, forcing allies to decide whether they want to risk taking it back, a new assessment says."

     The aim would be “breaking the alliance by causing it to fail to activate and act appropriately on its Article 5 commitments,” the Institute for the Study of War said in an analysis published Monday. 

    According to NATO’s founding charter, an attack on one member country is considered an attack on all of them. Invoking Article 5 is designed to trigger a collective military response by the other 31 countries in the bloc on behalf of the one under attack. 

    “A number of NATO states will likely be very hesitant to invoke Article 5 over a limited incursion, fearing the consequences of appearing to launch the alliance into a full-scale war with Russia,” the report said. 

    Such an operation around the Estonian border city of Narva could unfold without the major buildup that NATO might expect before an invasion, according to the Washington-based think tank. 

    Instead, Russia could position drone units inside its own territory while operatives seized key locations in Narva and declared a breakaway enclave.