Fresh off of Pentagon officials talking up plans to send multiple brigades worth of battle tanks and heavy weaponry to nations along the Russian border to “pre-position” for future events, the Russian government is threatening their own retaliatory buildup in the same region.
Russian Defense Ministry officials say the deployments in response will likely include a missile brigade in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave along the Baltic Sea that borders both Poland and Lithuania. They said other deployments were also possible.
And even though US officials were only yesterday touting their deployments as meant to reassure Eastern Europe of their support against Russia, Pentagon officials now insist that the Russians should not consider the deployments a threat and shouldn’t react at all.
Russia had previously threatened to put Iskander Missiles into Kaliningrad in response to a US plan to create a missile defense base in Poland. That plan was eventually scrapped, but US officials seem eager to keep throwing more assets into the region, leading to a protracted buildup by both them and Russia in the east.
