The Washington Post:
On a recent night at this air base where NATO fighter pilots keep a constant vigil against the Kremlin, the alarms that warn that Russian planes were veering toward NATO airspace wouldn’t stop going off.
At least 13 Russian warplanes coursed through the skies. And the NATO fighter jets kept rushing into the air to meet them. By the end of the night, Finland and Estonia said their airspace had been violated — and in the sea below, a powerful nuclear-capable missile system was on its way to a Russian naval base in the enclave of Kaliningrad.
Just ahead of the U.S. presidential elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be pushing his conflict with the West to new heights. He has declared an end to a plutonium-disposal agreement with the United States. Two weeks ago, he stationed new cruise missiles in Kaliningrad, further bolstering a territory that already was bristling with weaponry. And Aleppo is bracing for a renewed Russian bombardment that may begin soon. Many Western policymakers say he may be taking advantage of end-of-term distractions in the White House to exert as commanding a position as possible before a new president takes office Jan. 20.
For the seven German fighter pilots who trade 24-hour shifts at this remote air base, the escalation has a practical effect: more close encounters with Russian fighter pilots high in the skies. The pilots often fly within 10 yards of the Russian jets, close enough to wave hello, or in one recent incident, see a Russian pilot flash a middle finger.
“Maybe he watched too much ‘Top Gun,’ ” said Lt. Col. Swen Jacob, the commander of the German contingent that is posted for a four-month rotation to a round-the-clock air-policing mission in Estonia.
The Germans have scrambled 34 times since they arrived for their latest posting in Estonia on the last day of August, rushing into the air to escort Sukhoi fighter jets, Ilyushin reconnaissance planes and Antonov transport planes. The majority of the traffic comes from runs in international airspace between Russian air bases near St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave wedged between Lithuania and Poland. Russian military flights often fly without transponders, making them invisible to civilian aircraft and raising the risk of midair crashes.
“The fighter aircraft are almost always armed to the teeth,” Jacob said. “Six kinds of missiles. They could carry up to 10.”
As the United States prepares to vote, the Kremlin may be preparing in a different way, knowing that President Obama is unlikely to match Russia’s escalation so shortly before handing power to his successor, defense officials say. Recent Russian actions in Syria seem calculated to make major battlefield advances as quickly as possible. Baltic officials have seen a recent spike in cyberattacks. U.S. intelligence agencies say that Russian state-sponsored hackers are behind the leaks of emails of Democratic officials, which have been an embarrassing trickle seemingly calculated to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. On Russian state-run television, one prominent anchor repeated a warning that Russia could turn the United States into radioactive ash.
“One of the very important dates is the 8th of November. They’re trying to create a better negotiating position in Syria, in Ukraine, perhaps somewhere else,” said Marko Mihkelson, the chairman of the Estonian parliament’s National Defense Committee. “It’s a lame duck. And they’ll immediately test the new U.S. president with a very difficult position.”
Putin has acknowledged that he is looking past Obama and toward the next occupant of the White House.
“There are many issues it has become difficult to discuss with the current administration, because practically no obligations are met and no agreements are respected, including those on Syria,” Putin said late last month. “We are ready, in any case, to talk with the new president and look for solutions to any, even the most difficult, issues.”
But there is a risk of the Kremlin’s strategy backfiring, analysts say.
The demands attached to Putin’s suspension of the plutonium-disposition agreement were “clearly meant to be flipping the bird, in diplomatic terms,” said Alexander Vershbow, a veteran U.S. diplomat who until last month was the deputy secretary-general of NATO. “They’ve got to be careful not to get onto an even worse footing with the new U.S. administration.”
Vershbow said that the situation is as unstable as he had seen since he began his career in the late 1970s. During the late years of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin held to predictable rules of behavior, but now it does not, he said….
