U.S. sends heavy armour to Baltic states after Putin reveals Crimea plot

The United States has begun to deploy 3,000 troops on a three-month exercise to reassure Russia’s nervous neighbors in the Baltic, military officials said Monday. Operation Atlantic Resolve will see major NATO forces working alongside their allies in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — former Soviet republics now members of the Western alliance. Moscow’s annexation of Crimea last year and its meddling in the conflict in eastern Ukraine have galvanized NATO and focused particular attention on its vulnerable Baltic members.

I think we have to weigh carefully whether this would inject an additional element that could be a pretext or a trigger for counter-reaction by the Russian leadership.

Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to the U.S.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has described a secret meeting with officials in February of last year when Russia decided it would take the Crimean Peninsula, the Black Sea region that Moscow annexed from Ukraine last March. The military operation was initially kept secret and despite the increasingly obvious actions of unmarked Russian forces on the ground, Moscow insisted that only locals were involved in the upheaval. Later, the Kremlin conceded that it had been behind the power grab.

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