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Russian officials on Friday clapped back at a recently announced NATO deterrence plan that to looks to unite the alliance’s ground response capabilities, and has Moscow particularly worried about the vulnerabilities posed by its highly militarized exclave – Kaliningrad.
Warnings rang out from the halls of the Kremlin as one official warned that a deterrence strategy announced this week by U.S. Army Europe and Africa commander Gen. Christopher Donahue amounted to “a plan to unleash World War III with a subsequent global standoff [and] no winners.”
“An attack on the Kaliningrad region will mean an attack on Russia, with all due retaliatory measures stipulated, among other things, by its nuclear doctrine,” chairman of the Russian Parliamentary Committee on International Affairs Leonid Slutsky told the East 2 West media outlet.
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Slutsky further claimed that NATO poses a “threat to global security and stability” after Donahue, in explaining the new capabilities being rolled out by the U.S. and NATO militaries, said the alliance has the ability to “take down” Kaliningrad using ground-based operations “in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do.”
The strategy, dubbed the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line” and announced by the U.S. general on Wednesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, illustrates how NATO is rethinking its defensive strategy against the region’s chief threat – Russia.
The plan looks to enhance ground-based capabilities and utilize military-industrial interoperability, specifically in the Baltic region, to effectively counter and eliminate the threat posed by Russia based on lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.
While Donahue was not directly threatening Kaliningrad, his comments highlight the vulnerability that the territory – which is situated between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea and completely cut off from mainland Russia – poses to Moscow.
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Renewed focus has been brought to a sparsely populated strip of land known as the Suwalki Corridor, also known as the Suwalki Gap, which runs less than 60 miles in length and marks the Lithuanian-Polish border.
But the strip of land is also the only possible direct route between the Russian territory of Kaliningrad and that of ally to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarus.
“It’s Putin’s gap. It’s our corridor,” Russia expert and adjunct senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Peter Doran, told Fox News Digital. “Putin wants to close it. We must keep it open.
“All eyes in the Baltic States are focused on a potential military threat in the next few years, whereby Russia would reconnect the land corridor to Kaliningrad,” Doran highlighted. “That’s what has got a lot of people paying attention to Russia’s military force posture in the Baltic region.”
Donahue’s comments regarding NATO’s increased capabilities in the Baltic region not only didn’t go unnoticed by Russian leadership, but they highlighted the significant focus there is on the small Russian territory.
“Kaliningrad is Russian territory, and such threats are essentially a declaration of war,” Sergei Muratov, who serves on the Russian parliamentary committee on defense and security, told the East 2 West outlet.
Muratov said a full-scale war with NATO would be a very “different conversation” from the current war in Ukraine.
“None of them are ready for this,” he added.
Fox News Digital could not immediately reach U.S. European Command for comment.
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