Russia’s ‘wide-ranging’ military build-up spans 8,000 miles across globe

Russia’s ‘wide-ranging’ military build-up stretches far beyond Ukraine and across an expansive area of the globe, a NATO chief has warned.

David Cattler, Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence & Security, said the sphere has been expanded from the Baltic to the Arctic.

Renewed efforts are underway by the UK to address tensions with the Kremlin, which has an estimated 130,000 troops on the border with Ukraine amid fears that it is preparing to invade.

A geostrategic outlook shows that there is a far wider front in military activity by Russia that is pointing to future flashpoints. 

The activity has included Moscow planning a ‘live fire’ naval exercise off the Irish coast this month, before it was moved further away at Dublin’s request.

Around Ukraine, an estimated 30,000 Russian troops are taking part in a joint military exercise in neighbouring Belarus and six Russian warships have passed through Turkey’s Bosphorus Strait and are currently in the Black Sea, also for naval drills.

Mr Cattler said: ‘I think it’s fair to say that relations between the NATO member states, NATO as an alliance and Russia, is at the lowest point since the Cold War. In no small part because of Moscow’s aggressive actions that threaten security in the Euro-Atlantic area.’

Speaking to the Spycast podcast, recorded by the Washington Spy Museum, Mr Cattler framed the current tensions within a wider arc of Russian military operations.

‘We’ve seen violent oppression of political dissent in Russia,’ he said.

‘They undermine and destabilize their neighbours. I mean you can look at the cases of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

‘There, they continue to conduct a wide-ranging military build-up from the Baltic to the Black Sea, across the Mid East to North Africa, and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic.’

Scott Boston, a senior military analyst at the RAND Corporation, a US-based research group, told Metro.co.uk that ‘there’s no going back’ – regardless of whether Russia invades Ukraine.

‘If a war doesn’t happen, this will be a recurrent thing,’ he said.

‘If a war happens, obviously all the tension will go up.

‘This has unveiled an aspect of Russia’s intentions which we may have guessed at but now is very clear.’

NATO members have responded to Russia’s build-up by reinforcing Ukraine and some of its neighbours with military personnel and defensive weaponry, such as anti-tank systems. The UK announced this week that it is to send an extra 350 British troops to Poland, following the US committing 1,700 paratroopers to bolster its forces in the country.

‘The truth is, even right now, there’s no going back to the way it was before,’ Mr Boston said. ‘This is simply through the act of threatening Ukraine militarily and the different diplomatic gestures that were made, to the extent that they were sincere at all. It’s an open question as to what this thing looks like six months from now, let alone six years.’

Speaking to Metro.co.uk last month, Mr Boston said that Russia’s involvement in Syria had earned its military pilots combat experience that could be put to use in Ukraine. Moscow’s interests in the country include its military air base at Hmeimim in the northern Latakia province.

In Kyiv, human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviychuk told Metro.co.uk that Ukraine is the visible frontline for wider Russian interference in the affairs of democratic nations, including through cyberwar and economic tools.

‘Russia is not only at war with Ukraine,’ she said. ‘Russia started a very aggressive civilisation confrontation with the Western world, I mean with the free world, because it proposes the authoritarian model of governance and they are competing with the values of democracy, the values of freedom and human rights values. They use different tools to compete.

‘In well-developed democracies you can see how Russia uses cyberattacks, killing people even on the territory of Western democracies and using economic leverage like gas and even geopolitical conflict…A lot of informational, economical and political tools are also used in this arsenal.’

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss clashed with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow on Thursday while Boris Johnson visited Poland as the UK government addressed the crisis.

The prime minister also met NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels yesterday.

The attempt to reassure the West’s allies came amid the 10-day joint exercise in Belarus, due to end on February 20, which is said by NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, to be the biggest since the Cold War.

The exercises come amid a wider backdrop of Russian military activity that includes its warplanes flying near UK airspace before being intercepted by RAF crews operating out of Lossiemouth in Scotland.

In the Arctic, warships have been engaged in drills aimed at protecting a major shipping lane, with manoeuvres also planned in other seas off its shores, including the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

Warships in Moscow’s far east fleet on the Kamchatka Peninsula fired surface-to-air missiles and artillery guns in exercises publicised by Russian state news agency Tass this week.

Anti-submarine and minesweepers took part in the live-fire rehearsals on the peninsula, almost 8,000 miles from the Irish Sea.

The muscle-flexing has led to what is said to be the biggest invasion force assembled in Europe since the Second World War.

Mr Johnson warned yesterday that Russia had been ‘massing huge numbers of tactical battalion groups on the borders of Ukraine’.

He said: ‘This is probably the most dangerous moment, I would say – in the course of the next few days – in what is the biggest security crisis that Europe has faced for decades and we’ve got to get it right.’

The Defence Secretary met his counterpart in Moscow today, having signalled to the Kremlin before the trip that invading Ukraine would be a ‘lose-lose’ scenario.

Ben Wallace’s visit followed the UK putting 1,000 troops on standby in case there is a humanitarian crisis in the event of a Russian military assault.

Russia has repeatedly denied it is planning to invade Ukraine and has accused the West of seeking to provoke conflict in the region.

At the meeting in Moscow, Mr Lavrov attacked ‘ultimatums and moralising’ from the UK, which he described as a ‘road to nowhere’.

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