General Christopher Donahue, Commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa and the head of NATO’s ground forces, told Defense News on July 16 that NATO has put in place the Eastern Flank Deterrence Plan. NATO forces, he said, together with the U.S. Army, have the ability to quickly neutralize the Kaliningrad region of Russia in the shortest possible time. Citing the Kaliningrad region, which is surrounded on all sides by NATO countries, he said that NATO had the capability to “neutralize the region from the ground in a timeframe that previously seemed impossible—faster than ever before.”
“We’ve already planned that and we’ve already developed it. The mass and momentum problem that Russia poses to us … we’ve developed the capability to make sure that we can stop that mass and momentum problem,” he said.
Replying to these statements, Leonid Slutsky, the head of the LDPR party and chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, declared: “An attack on the Kaliningrad region would mean an attack on Russia with all the corresponding countermeasures, including those provided for by the Russian Federation’s nuclear doctrine. The American general must be clearly aware of this when making such statements,” Slutsky said.
