A quick housekeeping note: My house has been cleaned. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!!
The last several nights there has been robust discussions regarding what Putin/Russia is trying to accomplish with the incursions into Polish, Romanian, and Estonian air space. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that what Putin and Russia are doing with these incursions is forcing not just the Poles, the Romanians, and the Estonians to expend resources in response, but the other NATO allies in Europe as well. The Baltic states are not wealthy. It has been a long slow economic transition for them. They do not have the air forces that the other NATO member states have because they can’t really afford them. Which, because they’re part of NATO, they don’t need to. Or didn’t. The Baltic states bring other things to the alliance. One of them is providing some of the best capabilities for dealing with information warfare and influence operations in the Information Environment, especially within the Cyber Domain; as well as counter Cyber crime and Cyber warfare capabilities. But any response to repeated Russian violations of their air spaces means the expenditure of resources they don’t have. And that’s were NATO comes in. Every time a NATO member state has to respond in support of one of the Baltic States, as well as Poland and Romania, they’re burning resources. Aviation fuel, maintenance costs for their aircraft, flight hours, etc. We need to keep in mind that part of Putin’s/Russia’s objective is to economically exhaust the NATO member states by forcing them to respond to these excursions thereby leveling the playing field between NATO, its member states, and Russia.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
