"Fair Use for Information and Discussion Purposes"


http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-nato-nuclear-threat-20150507-story.html#page=1

Thanks Tom, Sure sounds like a serious escalation of troubled times ahead; Tribulatlion is at hand, and the Rapture is imminent.

Snippets from article above.

NATO countries are staging massive air, land and sea exercises across Russia's northern borders this month in response to warnings from the Kremlin and strategic analysts that President Vladimir Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons are more than bluster.

The exercises in Estonia, Lithuania and Norway involve more than 21,000 troops and state-of-the-art military hardware. Coupled with U.S. training of Ukrainian forces and the recent activation of a 3,000-strong rapid-reaction force to defend Eastern Europe, they appear intended to send a message to Moscow that the alliance is ready to defend its new members in Russia's backyard.

Troops, trainers and readiness testers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have been bolstering defenses along what Eastern Europeans call the new Iron Curtain. Although it still divides East from West, this time there are former Soviet subjects on the western side of the ideological border.

NATO's widening presence along Russia's frontiers is a reaction to Putin's aggressive actions against Ukraine over the last year, which have rattled nerves throughout the arc of states that still has painful memories of postwar Soviet domination.

On Monday, Estonia launched the biggest ground maneuvers in its history, Operation Hedgehog, drawing 13,500 troops from across the 28-nation alliance. In Lithuania, Operation Lightning Strike deployed more than 3,000 soldiers and police officers on a mission to test the effectiveness of military-civilian collaboration. The goal: to defeat the kind of stealth invasion and proxy war that Ukraine has been fighting for more than a year against pro-Russia separatists whom the Kremlin denies arming and instigating.

Submarines and an additional 5,000 sailors from the United States, Germany, Norway and non-NATO member Sweden have been engaged in antisubmarine maneuvers in the North Sea that have also drawn in surface vessels and aircraft from across the Western alliance.

NATO's saber-rattling hasn't exceeded the scale of Russia's recent war games, which have included a March show of force in the Barents Sea involving 30,000 soldiers and sailors and hundreds of warships and aircraft. But NATO's sweeping operations and displays of firepower have bolstered Putin's claims to be the target of a U.S.-inspired plot to conscript Moscow's former allies in isolating Russia to leave it vulnerable to Western-executed "regime change."

Putin has been making pointed reminders to his Western foes that Russia is nuclear-armed and ready to defend itself by any means necessary. In a docudrama produced for the March 18 anniversary of Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region, Putin said he contemplated the use of nuclear weapons in what the film cast as a white-knuckled confrontation with NATO over its purported luring of Ukraine away from its traditional alliance with Moscow.

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http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-nato-nuclear-threat-20150507-story.html#page=1[/url