Graphic shows timeline of Russian threats against northern Europe.
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MILITARY

Russian challenges to northern Europe

By Duncan Mil

October 9, 2018 - On October 25, Sweden and Finland will join NATO nations’ Trident Juncture 18 with 40,000 participants - NATO’s most significant military exercise since the end of the Cold War.

On March 29, 2013, two Tupolev Tu-22M3 strategic bombers escorted by four Sukhoi Su-27 jet fighters crossed the Gulf of Finland and came within 40 kilometres of Sweden’s island of Gotland, just 160km from the capital Stockholm. It was a Russian rehearsal of an air strike -- later revealed to be a nuclear strike -- on Sweden.

This was part of new military thinking within the Kremlin, what General Staff Chief Valery Gerasimov called “new-type warfare” (NTW) -- to gain information superiority over an opponent by using targeted cyber attacks, electronic warfare, as well as conventional high-precision weapons. An opponent’s political and economic system is made ungovernable, its population demoralised, and its critical military-industrial complexes destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

A year after the mock attack on Stockholm, Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and triggered an NTW-style separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Now jump forward to 2017, Stockholm has reintroduced military conscription and taken part in Aurora 17, an army exercise including the U.S. and other NATO troops to coincide with Russia’s Zapad war games, seen by many as a dress rehearsal for a possible move against NATO’s Baltic members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

In January this year, Stockholm re-established a military unit on Gotland, its first new regiment since the Second World War, and in May Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency distributed a brochure, darkly called “If Crisis or War Comes”, throughout Sweden.

Sources
PUBLISHED: 09/10/2018; STORY: Graphic News
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