Russia Fires Dozens of Military Officers in Baltic Region

[MikeWB]

Guys, we're getting closer to a hot war.



MOSCOW — In a sweeping military shake-up, Russia has replaced the top commanders of its Baltic Fleet, which patrols a region that has become the main fault line between Russia and the West.

The exact reasons for the mass dismissal, involving dozens of officers, remain unclear. But the public nature of the abrupt change, announced on Wednesday by Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu, was unprecedented.

The fleet commander, Vice Admiral Viktor Kravchuk; his chief of staff, Vice Admiral Sergei Popov; and the other officers were fired for "dereliction of duty" and "distortion of the real state of things," according to a statement by the Defense Ministry summarizing what the minister had said behind closed doors to senior military commanders.

The statement went on to say that the commanders had been responsible for "serious drawbacks in the organization of military training and everyday activities" and "lack of proper care for the personnel."

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"This is the first time in Russia's modern history that commanders have been dismissed in such a way," said Valentin Selivanov, a military analyst, retired admiral and former deputy head of the Russian Navy. "These commanders must have made a series of serious mistakes."

The dismissals are all the more surprising because President Vladimir V. Putin, who would have approved them, visited the fleet's main base at Baltiysk last July and was unsparing in his praise.
Photo
Vice Admiral Viktor Kravchuk, one of the officers whose firings were announced on Wednesday. Credit Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

"The Baltic Fleet is performing its missions well — not just here in the Baltic, where it is based, but is also carrying our flag with honor in other parts of the world's oceans, too," Mr. Putin said a year ago.

The Baltic Fleet headquarters is in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, squeezed between Poland and Lithuania, both NATO members. In recent years, Russia and NATO repeatedly accused each other of stirring up tensions in the region by deploying more arms and conducting provocative maneuvers.

Russia has repeatedly criticized what it calls NATO's growing presence in the Baltic. The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, confirmed at a news conference in June that the alliance would deploy four multinational battalions in rotation, each consisting of up to 1,000 soldiers, to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to keep Moscow in check.

Russia has said that it will not engage in a new arms race with the West, a point repeated by Mr. Putin on Thursday, but that it will be ready to defend itself.

"These actions of the Western colleagues undermine the strategic stability in Europe and force us to take retaliatory measures, primarily in the Western strategic direction," Mr. Shoigu, the defense minister, said during the meeting Wednesday. The Russian response has included adding ships and thousands of troops answering to the Baltic Fleet.

With the additional deployments, the number of Russian service members deployed on the country's western borders could grow by thousands, said Aleksei G. Arbatov, an expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

"The role of the Baltic Fleet is growing, but it can all spiral out of control," Mr. Arbatov said. "NATO deploys a battalion, we respond by deploying an army. If we want to make Sweden and Finland join NATO, there is no better way to do it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/europe/russia-fires-dozens-of-military-officers-in-baltic-region.html?_r=0

[MikeWB]

Chaos Consumes Russia's Baltic Fleet

    * By Matthew Bodner
    * Jul. 06 2016 13:24
    * Last edited 13:24



On July 26, 2015, on the annual Navy Day holiday, President Vladimir Putin traveled to Russia's western outpost of Kaliningrad to pay tribute to the country's resurgent armada.

"The courage of our sailors, the talent of our shipbuilders, and the spirit of our famous pioneers, explorers and naval commanders have confirmed Russia's status as a great sea power," the president declared. Putin reserved special praise for the Baltic Fleet, which was "carrying the flag with honor in the Baltic ... and in other parts of the world too."

The confident rhetoric rang loudly in Western capitals, where scores of experts and officials agreed with his assessment of Russia's modernized military. U.S. admirals now point to Russian submarines and defense arrangements as the leading threat to U.S. ships in European waters, and the Baltic Fleet is a focal point of those concerns.

But behind Putin's triumphant words, all was not as it seems with the Baltic Fleet.

On June 29, the Russian Defense Ministry announced it was purging the entire senior and mid-level command of the Baltic Fleet. It was a dramatic move that suggested deep structural problems within the fleet command. In total, 50 officers were dismissed from their post, including the fleet commander, Vice Admiral Viktor Kravchuk, and his chief of staff, Vice Admiral Sergei Popov.

Not since Stalin's purges had so many officers been ousted at once.

If the decision to remove the entire command staff was unprecedented in the Russian military tradition, the manner in which the Defense Ministry publicly accused the officers of dereliction of duty was even more surprising. Usually, a disgraced officer will be quietly shown the door, and a press release will chalk it all up to health troubles. But they made an example of Kravchuk.

On June 29, the Defense Ministry issued a statement that pulled no punches. Kravchuk and his command had, it said, showed "serious shortcomings in the organization of combat training, daily activities of their forces, failure to take all necessary measures to improve personnel accommodations, inattention to their subordinates and distorted reports on the real state of affairs [in the fleet]."

Russia's military watchers were caught off guard by the announcement, but have since offered several explanations for the heavy-handed treatment of Kravchuk and his staff.

"This is undoubtedly connected to the departure of Admiral Viktor Chirkov, the head of the navy, last year" says Mikhail Barabanov, editor-in-chief of Moscow Defense Brief, an analytical monthly published by the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST). Chirkov left his post in November 2015, with reports citing health concerns.

"Kravchuk was considered to be one of Chirkov's guys," says Barabanov. Both shared a history at the Baltic Fleet; for some time Kravchuk was Chirkvov's deputy commander. When Chirkov was promoted to Moscow, Kravchuk took the helm. With Chirkov's departure from the navy, "Kravchuk lost his patron."

Others, however, point to evidence of incompetence and corruption in what is seen by the Kremlin as an increasingly important strategic force in the face of heightened tensions with the NATO alliance since 2014.

The decision to fire the entire command came at the end of a month-long Defense Ministry inspection, which concluded on June 10. According to St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka.ru, the inquiry had been sparked by an unconfirmed collision of the submarine Krasnodar with another vessel — possibly a Polish patrol boat — during a training exercise. The Baltic command attempted to cover up the incident, Fontanka.ru reported.

According to Barabanov, the Baltic Fleet remains a secondary naval force. While it has received several new vessels, modernization efforts have little to do with the command staff. The Defense Ministry had a more ambitious vision for the Black Sea Fleet — that it become the central command authority for a "Fortress Kaliningrad" unified structure comprised of all Russian forces in the region.

Makeup of Baltic Fleet Command Forces

Source: russianships.info

The Fortress Kaliningrad structure is one of NATO's biggest nightmares in the region; Western commanders, already uneasy by their apparent geographic disadvantage in the Baltic region, have been sounding the alarm over the past two years. Kravchuk's task was to unify local air force units, coastal defense batteries, and even Iskander missile systems (when in theater) under the Baltic Fleet command. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's heavy-handed crackdown on Kravchuk suggests he failed to adequately do this, and the Baltic Fleet is unprepared for a potential war.

This is a very different mission for the Baltic Fleet than its traditional post-Soviet role as a training fleet. "Kravchuk may have failed to adapt to the new reality quickly enough," says Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian navy expert at the Virginia-based CNA think tank. "But I am beginning to think corruption was really the key."

According to Fontanka.ru, corruption indeed factored heavily into Shoigu's decision to liquidate the fleet command structure. Kravchuk reportedly had a relationship with a local organized crime boss, Viktor Bogdan, who was stealing diesel fuel from the fleet. Furthermore, part of the Fortress Kaliningrad project required housing to be constructed for the 11th Army Corps, stationed at the Baltiysk Naval Base. Funds for the barracks reportedly disappeared, and the soldiers were left to live in squalor, Fontanka.ru reported.

"The Russian leadership is clearly fine with corruption, but I think this was meant to signal others in the military and the security services that you can go ahead and steal and do what you want to do, but if you do that to an extent that combat readiness suffers, there will be consequences," Gorenburg says.

Shoigu has already appointed new commanders to the Baltic Fleet, Russian media outlets reported on July 1. The new commander will be Vice Admiral Alexander Nosatov from the Black Sea Fleet. His chief of staff will be Vice Admiral Igor Mukhametshin, a former commander of the Pacific Fleet's strategic nuclear submarine forces.

It is unlikely the Baltic Fleet will languish for long. According to reports, Nosatov has been given the rest of the year to turn the fleet around, and make it worthy of Putin's high praises on Navy Day, 2017.


http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/chaos-consumes-russias-baltic-fleet/574408.html

[yankeedoodle]

Total fucking propaganda bullshit.

New York Times - pure jew anti-Russian propaganda

Moscow Times  - obviously, a Mossad/CIA/MI6 propaganda mouthpiece for diplomats and dupes in Moscow, as well as a "reputable source from inside Russia" that shitheads can cite as "proof" of what is "really going on" inside Russia

Originally the newspaper was created for foreigners living and working in Moscow, 

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/contact_us/