1,100 NATO Troops Arrive in Poland to “Deter” Russia

The way President Trump spoke on the campaign trail, it sounded like he was going to repair our relationship with Russia. But with every week that passes, that seems less and less likely. This week for instance, NATO forces that mainly consisted of US soldiers moved into Poland in a show of force against Russia.

The U.S led battalion contained of 900 American soldiers, 150 British troops, and 120 Romanian troops. Though there have been many training exercises in recent years that involved those kinds of personnel numbers, this is definitely not a training exercise. The leader of the battlegroup, U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Steven Gventer, stated emphatically at a press conference that “this is a mission, not a cycle of training events. The purpose is to deter aggression in the Baltics and in Poland … We are fully ready to be lethal.”

And that’s not the only battlegroup in Eastern Europe. 120 British soldiers just landed in Estonia; the first of 800 that are expected to be posted in that country. That may not sound like a lot of soldiers, but it is a unique event. This is one of the largest deployments of UK forces to Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Germany and Canada are going to lead two additional battlegroups in Latvia and Lithuania by June. When all of these forces are in place, there will be a total of 4,000 NATO troops in the region for the sole purpose of deterring intimidating Russia.

And just like that, the Second Cold War just got a little bit warmer.