RT: Coincidence? Baltic Invasion Story Reappears As Pentagon Seeks To Quadruple Europe Spending

[Purveyor]

It seems that Putin is about to invade the Baltics. Again.

With journalists and commentators distracted by Syria and Europe’s refugee crisis, Putin’s enduring desire to dash Westwards across the continent “recreating the Soviet Union” was seemingly put on the media’s back burner for a while. In fact, journalists had been oddly quiet on the subject of the Baltic states and a potential Russian invasion for months.

A piece published by the Financial Times last July admitted that the “consensus” among diplomats and analysts was that Putin had “not embarked on a rampage” to recreate an empire “as some feared last year”.

Given that new-found consensus, one might have suspected that the lull in stories about a forthcoming invasion could be chalked up to journalists deciding to put the subject to rest — but one would have been wrong. For they were back last week with a vengeance.
Interesting timing

On February 2, the Pentagon announced it would seek to quadruple its budget for Europe in 2017 to deter “Russian aggression”. On February 3, the UK’s BBC aired a fictitious ‘war gaming’ account of a Russian invasion of Latvia, complete with a nuclear strike on a Royal Navy warship and a planned strike on London — an exercise which one expert termed“psychological warfare”. On the same day, an American think tank, the RAND Corporation — which is partly funded by the US Department of Defense — claimed that Russia would be able to “overrun” the Baltics in 60 hours.

In the weeks leading up to the new media blitz, the Atlantic Council — whose primary founding aim is to defend NATO interests — had gotten the ball rolling again with a piece about Putin’s “next potential target” — which, you guessed it, was the Baltics. The piece was then re-published by Newsweek with the headline: “Counting down to a Russian invasion of the Baltics”.

MORE...

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/331654-baltic-invasion-russia-propaganda/

[Igel]

1. Do you recall Putin's criticism of Lenin?

It was quite recent, the last week or so.

While he said good things about communism--just not how it was implemented in the USSR--he's still convinced that Lenin was on the wrong side of an argument with Stalin. Constituent republics of the USSR should not have had the right to secede, their borders should not have been drawn in order to consolidate ethnic boundaries.

People took this to have specific, narrow, reference to the Donbas. However, Belorus' borders were drawn in precisely that way, as were many of the central Asian republics'. When the Baltics were annexed by Stalin and that part of the empire restored, their borders remained drawn on largely ethnic lines and they, too, ultimately, were able to secede.

the first countries to secede from the USSR were Moldova, the Baltics, Armenia, and Georgia. Moldova quickly ran into problems created by Moscow and still has a strip of its territory under de facto Russian control. Armenia's problems resulted from the strange borders drawn that placed it at perpetual odds with the Azeris. Georgia ran into it's own problems, largely of Russian making. The Baltics were Western and visible enough that nothing much has happened to them, apart from some early very damaging embargos and some threats, not always veiled, over the years. Then again, having the annexed formerly German territory on one side of you and Russia on the other can be seen as a threat: Kaliningrad has typically been closed and houses not only a large military force but also nukes.

Poland's borders were drawn on ethnic grounds; Stalin reversed this after the war by claiming a swath of Polish territory as spoils of war, and pushed Poland westward, with a huge number of Poles being what we'd call "ethnically cleansed" and moved to Western Poland (to create the neo-Polish dialects), and with a correspondingly large number of ethnic Germans kicked out and pushed west into what was still Germany. In Kaliningrad (okay, Koenigsburg) the Germans were simply expelled or taken captive by Russia.

His criticism of Lenin is part and parcel with Putin's condemnation of the breakup of the USSR as one of the worst events of the 20th century. Ukraine's problem is that it dared to not want to be part of a greater neo-imperial polity focused on the "Russian Idea" as a special country, uniting East and West, with Russia at its God-given place at the helm and controlling the frontier of the East and West.

[newthinking]

2. No coincidence. Part of the narrative for "The New American Century"

PNAC continues and MIC based wealth expands.

[KoKo]

3. ...!

A Good Read..for inquiring minds.