German press: Russian missiles on the border with Europe

BERLIN  – The free world fears new threats to Putin ‘s assertive Russia, against the backdrop of the Ukrainian crisis and  of big coalitions with Angela Merkel is confirmed chancellor in Berlin . According to indiscretions published by the Bild newspaper and its online edition, the Russian armed forces have deployed on the Polish border the fearsome and precise mobile missiles called the SS-26 Stone in NATO code and Iskander-M from the Kremlin. They are offensive weapons, they can carry a nuclear warhead and with a radius of at least 500 kilometers they could affect not only the entire territory of a key NATO country like Poland, but even Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and other vital German cities.

We do not confirm the news, it can be unreliable given that it comes from Bild, high German sources tell us, but they add: we are verifying it carefully, with our services and with the help of friendly intelligence services, we await the results of these checks before saying whether it is true or not and, if true, to formulate a political reaction.

If the news were confirmed, it would mark a new leap forward in the escalation of the confrontation between a West determined to defend human rights in Ukraine as well as in the Russian Federation or elsewhere, and a Kremlin whose strong man appears determined to rebuild to the maximum extent possible the Empire that Russia had first under the tsars, then with the Soviet totalitarian dictatorship.

Putin had long threatened the deployment of the SS-26s as a reaction, absolutely disproportionate in both political and military terms, to the NATO plan to build and deploy an anti-missile shield in Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania to defend the Alliance from the potential threat of missiles Iranians or North Koreans equipped with nuclear warheads.

A plan directed against Tehran and Pyongyang, certainly not against the enormous strategic missiles of Moscow, such as the SS18 Satan capable of carrying up to 40 warheads, or the SS 25 Topol. But it is one thing to threaten the deployment of such offensive weapons, something else, from a political and geopolitical point of view, to pass from threats to facts. Bild says that the Russians would certainly have deployed more than ten, or a two-digit number however of SS-26 in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, between the north-east of Poland and the Baltic republics also members of NATO.

Kaliningrad, the ancient Prussian Koenigsberg where the great philosopher Immanuel Kant was born, was annexed by the USSR after the Nazi defeat and is a special government territory: in its control the commands of the Vmf (the Russian navy) and the Rvsn (the Kremlin’s missile force) have a lot to say. Just as the West offers mediations on the Ukraine crisis, and while Angela Merkel strongly calls for freedom and self-determination for Ukraine by supporting Klitschko and the other leaders of the democratic opposition, the news, true or not, helps to freeze again little bit of a new cold war climate that Russian President Vladimir Putin is creating between the former two post-war blocs.

And at the same time, German and other Central European countries of NATO note here – while almost all the countries of the Atlantic Alliance cut military spending due to weak economic conditions, Eurocrisis and sovereign debt crisis – Russia is developing many expensive and state-of-the-art weapon systems: new submarines, new missiles, the new bombers for the Sukhoi 34 supersonic flight, and many other weapons systems. Weapons designed to threaten a first blow, not defensive weapons.

December 14th 2013