[Skybird]

Still Kaliningrad is a strategic top priority for Moscow, due to its location and strategic importance. With some of your claims on weapon data stationed there, I must disagree, on some others I point at the very diverse sources and their different claims. S300 may be an old orignal Sovjet design, envertheless it has seen notoriousnupdates and upgrades and today with latest upgrades and new missiles is one of the world's top notch air defence systems - the F35 has been specifically designed and called for just in reaction to this threat, amongst other demands. Whether F35 can really defeat S300 with klatest kit, is something different. Latest tests of S300 over the past 4-8 years saw it performing with excellent scores, even setting up some firsts in the history books.

You comfortably ignore too many aspects there that oppose your simplified claim of that the Russian moves in the area are posing no threat. In parts Kaliningrad is a defensive situation indeed, and NATO arrogant expansion to the east and broken promises to not do so ever certainly have not helped to keep relations to Russia intact. But Moscows reactions in past years moved beyond just taking on defensive needs for that enclave, and the whole russian foreign policy has become far more aggressive. Many of the incidents in the Baltic air derive from Russian attempts to move in aerial reinfocements without active transponders, and the fact that Russian forces aggressively approached and sometimes penetrated foreign sea space and air space cannot be denied. This cannot be just a reaciton to realistic fears for a sudden nATO attack : NATO simpyl lacks the military forces needed to attack Russia in the Baltic area, all of a sudden. And why should it even want that? In Russia, on the other hand, there is a clearly defined desire by many to restore the fame and glory of the good old empire, and to get back the buffer zone that the Warsaw Pact states once had officially been defined as. The way to do so, to get all that back, is destabilization of the West (split between Europe and the US, destabilizing the EU by any means, taking Germany out as opinion leader), and destabilization of the Baltic states and manipulation of global opinion.

And where have we seen the textbook demonstration for a testrun for this kind of new warfare? Correct, during the Crimean conflict. A masterfully executed textbook example, I admire the precision of the execution.

I don't buy your claims, ikalugin. That in the past I voiced my belief that I could understand why Russia does what it does, does not mean that I sympathise with it. Its the pure and sober techniques and mechanisms of power, seen without any sentimentality. But that is more about "understand thy enemy", not about agreeing with him.