Andrew Korybko
There’s little chance that Russia will agree to
military-strategic compromises as part of a US-brokered grand deal with E-NATO,
despite the promising economic opportunities that this could unlock, unless
E-NATO reciprocates
The Telegraph published a
piece in late October citing unnamed diplomatic sources to report that “Russia hopes to weaken Nato with Ukraine peace
talks”. They expect that “Putin will probably demand that Nato’s footprint
in Europe be reduced to its 1997 level, before former Eastern bloc countries
began joining the alliance”, per his security
guarantee requests from late 2021. This prediction is premised on his top
aide Yury Ushakov announcing
that Russia now wants Europe to participate in the peace process.
According to The Telegraph,
“That would mean a potential withdrawal of Nato troops from Poland, Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Finland, which joined the alliance in 2023.”
That’s not exactly true, technically speaking, since Russia called for a return
to the continental military-strategic status quo from the date when the
NATO-Russian Founding Act was signed in 1997. What that would mean in practice
is the withdrawal of pre-1997 NATO members’ troops from new members’
territories.
Meanwhile, post-1997 NATO
members’ forces could still hypothetically deploy to one another’s territories,
which is significant in light of Poland now commanding European NATO’s (E-NATO)
largest
army and the de
facto Swedish-led Viking Bloc rapidly militarizing in parallel. Sweden’s
deployment of air and naval forces to help patrol
Finland’s borders with Russia together with its deployment of air
and air
defense ones to Poland testifies to the strength of their
military-strategic partnership in the Baltic Sea.
As was assessed here, it could even lay the basis for their joint military patronage over the Eastern Baltic as the core of NATO 3.0, which refers to the Europeans leading NATO’s containment of Russia while the US “Pivots (back) to (East) Asia” for more robustly containing China. The Intermarium, which refers to the states between Germany and Russia, is expected to play the most prominent role therein. Poland and Sweden are its heavyweights, so it naturally follows that they’d jointly lead its containment of Russia.
























