Black Sea helicopter forces drill in Crimea. (c) Vasily Batanov / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.The drums of war are beating. Earlier this year, a controversial (and critiqued) study by the RAND Corporation claimed that Russia could essentially overrun the Baltic states in three days, and there was nothing NATO could do about it.
This month, a Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) report warned that Russia “is modernizing conventional military capability on a large scale; the state is mobilizing for war.” Meanwhile, as NATO beefs up its conventional and anti-missile defences on its eastern flank, Moscow conducted a snap exercise of its mobilisation capacities and its ability to call up thousands of reservists. Are we sliding to war? Of course not. Almost certainly.
But the tone of the debate in both Russia and the west, and the willingness of both to build up an image of military confrontation, sheds depressing light on the current state of relations and raised risks that remain serious.
