Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 10 – NATO forces
could occupy the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad in two days, a Chinese
commentator says, far faster than two American experts have said; but if the
Western alliance did so, Moscow would respond by attacking five to eight
European capitals, thus transforming a regional conflict into a world war.
In September, a NATO official said
that NATO had developed a plan to take out Russian anti-aircraft facilities in
Kaliningrad in the event of war (lenta.ru/news/2019/09/20/kaliningrad/),
and last month, US military expert Richard Hooker wrote for the Washington-based
Jamestown Foundation that NATO could seize the exclave in two weeks (lenta.ru/news/2019/10/27/force/).
Now, China’s Eastday news agency has
weighed in with its own assessment, one that suggests Moscow would lose control
of Kaliningrad far more quickly than
these Western experts suggested (lenta.ru/news/2019/11/10/2/); and Russian outlets are not surprisingly
outraged.
What is perhaps the most important aspect
of this discussion is that Moscow hopes to use it as another occasion to divide
and weaken NATO by suggesting that in the event Russia would attack European
cities rather than US ones (rubaltic.ru/article/politika-i-obshchestvo/14112019-rossiya-otvetit-na-vtorzhenie-nato-v-kaliningrad-bombardirovkami-stolits-evropy/).
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