Kaliningrad: Russia’s fortress deep inside Europe is a growing thorn in NATO’s side

AGGRESSIVE air patrols. Simulated nuclear strikes. Paratroop invasion practice. Putin’s fortress deep within Europe has NATO up in arms again.

AGGRESSIVE air patrols. Simulated nuclear strikes. Paratroop invasion practice. Now, Putin’s heavily armed fortress deep within Europe has NATO up in arms again.

Russia’s Interfax news agency this week declared that long range anti-ship missiles are the latest addition to a rapid arms build-up in an isolated bastion of the Russian military: the bristling Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.

It’s a relic of the Soviet Union’s campaign against Nazi Germany.

It’s become a major thorn in NATO’s side.

A Bastion anti-ship missile is test fired from its mobile launcher. Picture: Russian MoD

In October, Russia alarmed Europe when it sent a unit of mobile nuclear Iskander missiles to be permanently based in Kaliningrad. From this fortress, they can reach the German capital of Berlin. They were soon joined by two warships capable of carrying nuclear-tipped Kalibr cruise missiles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin blames the west: “We are concerned by NATO decision making,” he said yesterday. “We have, therefore, to take countermeasures, which means to target with our missile systems the facilities that in our opinion start posing a threat to us.”

Today, NATO declared the latest addition to Kaliningrad’s arsenal “does not help to lower tensions or restore predictability to our relations”.

But NATO should not be surprised at the moves, says Dr Matt Fitzpatrick, associate professor in international history at Flinders University.

“Russia remains convinced that it had received iron clad commitments not to enlarge NATO in the East in 1990,” he says. “In some ways that was their price for German unification.”

Kaliningrad, positioned as it is betwen Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Coast, is in an ideal position for any sabre-rattling to make that point.

A Russian Su024 strike fighter flies fast and close to the USS Donald Cook in April this year. It was just one of a string of Cold War-style confrontations in the Baltic Sea. Picture: US Navy

WAR-GAMES

The Russian enclave is the spearhead of a network of Russian military bastions aimed directly at the heart of Europe. These being built-up along its eastern frontier — reaching from Murmansk in the north to Syria in the south.

It’s also an open threat to the former Soviet Union states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. All have been the target of increasingly hostile rhetoric from President Putin since casting their lot with Brussels instead of Moscow.

“They are conducting large-scale, no-notice exercises close to NATO borders, but perhaps most importantly Russia has been willing to use military force against neighbours,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said late last month.

“We have seen that in Georgia and we have seen it in Ukraine with illegal annexation of Crimea and the continued destabilisation of eastern Ukraine. So therefore NATO has to respond.

“(Kaliningrad) could make it very difficult for any of us to get up into the Baltic Sea if we needed to in a contingency,” General Ben Hodges, commander of US Army Europe, told the Pentagon earlier this year.

And Russia’s belligerent president has been ramming that point home since his 2014 invasion of Crimea and interference in Ukraine.

This is why NATO’s recent BALTOPS 2016 military exercise was specifically tailored to practice countering an area-denial bastion, just like Kaliningrad. It’s also rushing to preposition its troops and tanks in the Baltics by early next year.

But what this force can achieve has been called into question.

The RAND Corporation international affairs think-tank recently war gamed the defence of the Baltic States.

It found NATO to be incapable of protecting the territory of its most far-flung members.

“The longest it has taken Russian forces to reach the outskirts of the Estonian and/or Latvian capitals of Tallinn and Riga, respectively, is 60 hours,” the report reads. “Such a rapid defeat would leave NATO with a limited number of options, all bad.”

European forces and their key US ally would simply not have the time to reinforce its ‘trip-wire’ troops, thanks largely to interference from aircraft, ships and missiles based in Kaliningrad.

RAND says a late counteroffensive would be both bloody and “fraught with escalatory risk”.

It concedes even a temporary defeat would result in “predictably disastrous consequences for the Alliance and, not incidentally, the people of the Baltics”.

A mobile launcher test-fires a Bastion anti-ship missile. This long range and extremely fast missile has now been deployed to Kaliningrad. Picture: Russian Ministry of Defence

BALTIC BASTION

Last year, Russian forces operating out of Kaliningrad practised a paratroop assault in the Baltic Sea. Some military analysts felt it was a rehearsal for a surprise attack against Sweden’s Gotland Island, 300km off the coast of Kaliningrad.

If Russian forces were to hold this island, it, combined with their Kaliningrad bastion, would dominate the entire Baltic Sea.

It was an obvious ‘message’ aimed at the former Soviet Baltic States. And a warning to neutral Sweden not to go ahead with proposals to join NATO.

“When a country joins NATO, it becomes next to impossible for it to resist pressure from a major NATO leader such as the United States and hence it may deploy anything ... a missile defence system, new bases or, if need be, missile strike systems,” President Putin said yesterday.

Nations across Europe having been strengthening their joint military capabilities and co-operation in recent years as a response to growing Russian military assertion. Picture: Getty

Dr Fitzpatrick says this has been Moscow’s consistently repeated fear.

“NATO has always insisted that sovereign states should have the right to decide what treaty organisations are in their best interests, but Russia sees this only as diplomatic cover for increased NATO encirclement of Russia,” he says. “As such the Russians are keen to present NATO membership not as the safe option but the risky one, courting conflict with Russia.”

NATO’s militaries — including Britain — have in the past year been steadily repositioning tanks and troops in its eastern member states. The goal is to have one battalion in each of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland as ‘trip-wires’ — a signal to Russia that any advance on these sovereign nations will be an attack against NATO itself.

But the ability to reinforce and resupply these forces in any conflict would be placed in serious jeopardy by fortress Kaliningrad.

What makes Kaliningrad such an asset for Putin is its capacity to act as a ‘roadblock’, or, in military parlance, an anti-access / area denial (A2/AD) bastion.

Simply put, anything that passes close potentially puts itself at risk.

President Putin inspects ships of the Russian Baltic Fleet based in Kaliningrad last year. Picture: AFP

FORTRESS KALININGRAD

The enclave sits on the Baltic Coast, with Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north. Both were once members of the Soviet Union. Both are now members of NATO.

This rankles Putin, who paints this switch of sides as an act of aggressive expansion by the West.

Kaliningrad was originally the German city of Konigsberg. It and the surrounds were a remnant of a medieval enclave carved from the local Baltic tribes by military monks, the Teutonic Knights.

It was annexed by the Soviet Union an April 7, 1946. The German population was expelled.

A picturesque seaside quay in the city of Kaliningrad. Picture: Supplied

Now holding just short of one million Russian nationals, it is one of the region’s economic powerhouses.

While the enclave has no direct land links with Russia, it does offer a year-round open port for its Baltic fleet to operate from — free from the ice that chokes harbours further north.

This has been established to support Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet, a force of some eight large warships, 20 patrol vessels and three submarines.

It also houses several heavily defended military airfields.

On the ground is a considerable, though largely defensive, force of troops. A Motorised Rifle Regiment and two rifle brigades are housed in different locations within the enclave. They are supported by an artillery brigade and two missile brigades.

Of a more offensive nature, however, is a brigade of Marine troops with their associated landing ships and hovercraft.

Part of the Voronezh early-warning radar racility in Kaliningrad. This radar can track aircraft over all of Europe and parts of the North Atlantic. Picture: Russian Ministry of Defence

Kaliningrad offers Moscow the unique ability to peer deep into the West.

The Voronezh early warning radar became operational in Kaliningrad in 2014. It can monitor air traffic across all of Europe and into the Atlantic Ocean. It is said to be able to simultaneously track more than 500 objects.

Protecting this and Kaliningrad’s air and sea ports is a new detachment of Moscow’s most modern anti-aircraft missiles, the S-400 Triumf. These can engage targets up to 400km away.

“The air control capability that Putin’s A2/AD systems afford him, could easily be used to threaten the airspace of all the Baltics,” Alarik Fritz, a senior analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses, wrote earlier this year. “That gets at the very issue of NATO security and sovereignty over those countries. So we need to keep in mind that it’s an offensive as well as defensive capability.”

Dr Fitzpatrick says he sees the recent repositioning of ships and missiles is a continuation of previous posturing.

“As NATO has crept closer to the Russian border, Russia has sought to draw a series of red lines,” he says. “The past and recent conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine are evidence of this.

“The current situation might be seen in this light, coming at an opportune moment for Russia, while the US is preoccupied with the Trump crisis and Germany is dealing with domestic issues such as the politics of refugee assistance.”