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NATO provocations likely to trigger war with Russia: Analyst

Tuesday, 07 June 2016 5:47 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 07 June 2016 5:48 PM ]

US troops parachute on the military compound near Torun, central Poland, June 7, 2016, as part of the NATO Anaconda-16 military exercise. (Photo by AFP)

Press TV has interviewed Fred Weir, a journalist and political commentator from Moscow, about Moscow’s response to NATO’s advancement near the eastern borders of Russia.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: First of all give us your thoughts on the recent escalation of the war of words between Moscow and NATO, the Kremlin spokesman has been quite vocal against the Western military alliance’s war games in Europe.

Weir: What the Russians see and they see it through the prism of their own history where they were invaded by Napoleon and later by Hitler and it all started from jumping off points and they see this happening. And I know in the West they say that the Russians are paranoid, but they do definitely see in these war games an effort to create forward bases. Although the war games will end in a couple of weeks, the places that have been prepared, the bases with preposition supplies and so on will remain and this is what the Russians are pointing to there.

They see themselves not just being encircled but all the former states that were part of the Soviet Union or part of the Warsaw Pact specially Poland, the Baltic states, Romania are becoming forward bases that might be used and you may say this is paranoid or not, but the Russians definitely see these physical developments as threatening and that’s basically what they’re pointing to and it’s a very very dangerous thing because state of mind always plays a heavy role in these things. If the Russians fear attack, then the danger of war starting accidentally or not, it becomes much much greater.

Press TV: What kind of response in this instance are you expecting from Russia?

Weir: I think that they’re going to preposition more of their own troops near the borders, I mean, it will make the trigger for war that much shorter, you see, the fuse shorter, if you have these bases that didn’t exist for the past 20 years suddenly facing each other across that border, but this is what they’ll do. They’ll do tit for tat. They might also do asymmetrical responses. I think that there is a lot of talk about prepositioning or positioning, installing, mid-range surface to surface missiles in Kaliningrad, which is the Russian exclave on the Baltic. They may do other things as well. It’s an unpredictable situation.

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