The former Deputy Chief of Staff of NATO in Europe General, Sir Richard Shirreff, is convinced that there’s a significant risk of war in the Baltic countries which might be the destination that the Kremlin is heading to.
Speaking in an exclusive interview for the Swedish broadcaster SVT on Sunday, Shirreff, who’s Sweden to give a lecture at the Royal Academy of War Sciences, noted that, according to him, Putin’s intention has been clear all along.
Shirreff believes that the Russian president wants to re-establish Russian rule in the former republics of the Soviet Union in the Baltics, such as Estonia, Latvia, where significant Russian-speaking minorities live as well as Lithuania.
The Soviet Union – which had grown significantly territorially post-WW2 by incorporating eastern Poland, northern East Prussia, Transcarpathia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, parts of Karelia, the Baltic states, parts of the Kuril archipelago, and the island of Sakhalin’s southern part – emerged as the only real superpower in Europe after the war with subordinate states gathered in an emerging socialist bloc.
He backed up his arguments with Putin’s statement that the most appropriate security settlement for Europe is a new Yalta, which Shirreff interprets as a danger that they must take very seriously and be concerned about.
Yalta was the place of the conference in 1945 where plans for the occupation of Germany after the end of the war were drawn by Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill.
According to Shirreff, one of NATO’s top military officers from 2011 to 2014, Putin has expressed on previous occasions his wishes to reunite all Russians, including those living in the Baltics, under the banner of ‘Mother Russia’.
He does not rule out a Russian invasion of Poland or other Eastern European countries that used to be part of the Warsaw Pact and are now part of NATO, pointing out that the alliance must discourage any form of attack on any NATO member.
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