Two weeks after the U.S. warplanes and airmen arrived in Lithuania, the president of neighboring Estonia officiated over the opening of the newly expanded and modernized Amari Air Base in his nation, which the local press reported can accommodate 16 NATO jet fighters, 20 military transport planes and 2,000 troops. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said "The construction of the Amari Air Base, which was jointly financed by the Estonian state and NATO, is a perfect expression of the solidarity between allies" [3] and that "the completion of the air base would make it much easier to bring allied troops and their equipment to Estonia in the event of a crisis situation."
He also "underscored the fact that from 2012, when the complex as a whole
is due for completion, NATO will have one of the most modern air force bases in the region at its disposal." [4]
Estonian Air Force chief Brigadier General Valeri Saar confirmed that Baltic air policing warplanes could use the base in the future and that NATO pilots will begin to employ it for training purposes beginning in October.
Not only have NATO and the U.S. moved military personnel and aircraft into nations bordering northwestern Russia, but they have done so in flagrant violation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) negotiated in 1989 between the 16 members of NATO and six of the Warsaw Pact at the time, which mandated comprehensive limits on several categories of conventional military equipment in Europe.
The treaty was signed in 1990 and ratified the next year after the dissolution of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, which created gray areas that the Pentagon could exploit - as it has through NATO's eastward expansion in the interim - to station military hardware and personnel in Russia's fellow Black Sea states Bulgaria and Romania and in its Baltic Sea neighbors Estonia, Lithuania and Poland.
The CFE pact was signed by 22 nations and ratified by 30: The 16 members of NATO, six non-Soviet former members of the Warsaw Pact and eight ex-Soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are not signatories to the treaty. Neither is former Yugoslav republic Slovenia, inducted into NATO along with the three Baltic states in 2004.
In 1999 an Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE-II) was signed during the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe summit in Istanbul by the same 30 countries that had endorsed the original.
To date only four former Soviet republics - Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine - have ratified it. NATO nations have sabotaged the treaty's implementation by linking it, without legitimate legal or other grounds, with the withdrawal of what until recently were small Russian peacekeeping contingents in Transdniester, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. What NATO refers to as the Istanbul Commitments. 1,500 Russia troops in Transdniester have no impact on European security, but by preventing the CFE-II treaty from entering into force the U.S. and NATO retain the right to violate the treaty's (and its predecessor's) limits on troops and armaments - including combat aircraft and attack helicopters - in non-signatory nations like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russia suspended its commitments under the CFE-II treaty three years ago because of concerns over the U.S. and NATO deploying troops and equipment to Eastern Europe and the threat of missile shield
deployments to follow.
This past May the first deployment of U.S. anti-ballistic missiles in Europe was achieved when a Patriot Advanced Capacity-3 missile battery and over 100 troops were moved into the Polish city of Morag near the Baltic Sea.
When on September 17 of last year U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the decision to shift from previous interceptor missile plans for Eastern Europe to the "smarter, stronger, and swifter" phased adaptive approach, discussions began on stationing Standard Missile-3 interceptors, both the traditional ship-based and new land-based versions, in the Baltic as well as the Black and Mediterranean Seas.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania not having signed the original CFE treaty or its successor and no NATO state having ratified the adapted agreement permit Washington to deploy longer-range interceptor missiles as well as warplanes to and off the coasts of the three Baltic states.
The U.S. and NATO have claimed that moving military forces and equipment into Eastern Europe, several thousand U.S. troops to Bulgaria and Romania at any given times along with jet fighters to the Baltic Sea region and missiles to Poland, is not in violation of the CFE treaty as they are not permanent deployments. But they are. NATO's Baltic air policing mission, for example, has been conducted for almost six and a half years and, as seen above, is expanding in scope into the indefinite future.
Moreover, NATO's four new members on the Baltic Sea - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland - have been transformed into training grounds for the Pentagon's and NATO's wars abroad, especially that in Afghanistan, and to prepare for potential confrontation and conflict with fellow Baltic littoral state Russia.
U.S. troops, warships and warplanes are present in the region on a regular basis, conducting military exercises several times a year.
The trade-off between the U.S. and other founding members of NATO on the one hand and the bloc's new members in Eastern Europe on the other is for the latter to provide bases for use by Washington and Brussels and to supply troops for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as others to come in exchange for NATO and its main member the U.S. - the world's sole military superpower - placing them under the Alliance's Article 5, the bulk of which states:
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