Scenario: Russian Invasion of the Baltic States

[Airborne Rifles]

The Russians have two reasons for caring about the Baltics:

1. The first is defensive. Think about this from the Russian perspective: 70 years ago a coalition of western/Central European states invaded Russia and killed 30 million Russians. Thirty years before that, a coalition of Central European states (German and Austria-Hungary) invaded Russia and killed a whole bunch of Russian. Sixty years before that, a coalition of Western European States and The Ottoman Empire invaded Crimea and killed a bunch of Russians. Forty years before that, a coalition of western/Central European states under Napoleon invaded Russia and killed a whole bunch of Russians. And on and on. They look at history with a great deal of mistrust towards the west. Add that to the fact that the Baltic states were actually part of Russia from 1721-1918, and part of the USSR from 1945-1991, and the fact that all the previous invasions of Russia had to start much further west, and you can start understand why they care about the Baltics.

2. The second reason is offensive: how can Russia destroy NATO today? Not by marching to the Rhine. The way Russia can destroy NATO is by invading a NATO country and then by nuclear brinksmanship or other means demonstrate that the alliance is unwilling to defend its members, which is the organizations entire reason for existence. If they can do that, they destroy NATO's legitimacy and the alliance could unravel.

As far as willingness to use nukes, the Russians have been very open about the fact that they are. They recently refused to renew a treaty that pledged that they would not use nukes first, and they've been open about threatening states like Denmark with nukes for accepting US missile tracking sites. They ar banking on the fact that NATO is NOT willing to go that far, and that this unwillingness would bring Europe and the US to the peace table in the event of a shooting war. It's scary stuff.

[IronDuke99]

I am certain UK would use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack on British territory and, perhaps, on British forces. A large scale Chemical attack, that caused a lot of casualties, might also trigger that response. I am not sure much else would, outside an actual attempted invasion, or that it should.

I really cannot see why on earth the EU, or NATO, wants the Baltics to be in their orbit rather than being a more or less neutral buffer zone between Russia and the West. To me exactly the same thing applies to Ukraine. I would try to defend nothing further East than Poland.

To my mind the EU has many, huge, internal political problems, and next to no military muscle -especially since Brexit- to back it up its extravagant ambitions. The EU's, largely unelected, political elites attempts to create EU armed forces are not only almost certainly doomed to failure but are actually very dangerous from the point of view of NATO, that remains the actual cornerstone of Western European defence and security.

To put it bluntly if the USA loses interest in NATO, Europe is up s..t creek without a paddle.