It is great to see such a big crowd in july for this event. Guest. To add a special he is the chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, and also the undersecretary for defense policy. As some of you may know, he served previously here at the embassy in washington. It is great to see him back in town. I am going to say a few words andre we let our experts regional representatives loose. I want to say in the very near future, the focus will shift to the black sea region. This is obviously in response to a rush of the continues to be assertive in and around europe and elsewhere. It is clearly bent on altering the european order, especially with military power. There is a special interest to the broader community. He can tell us quite a bit about russian intentions and the capabilities. Previous iterations of this exercise have showed us how russia can, for example, mobilize across distances. Given us a window into russian thinking about the use of key capabilities during a crisis, cleaning these of listed missiles and even nuclear weapons. This is important, not only for us in washington, but also nato and brussels and other allied capitals. A visa, this session is an important opportunity to write a public preview of what could be asected in the coming months the exercise draws closer and what the longterm implications are for the u. S. , nato and all of its members in terms of defense, reinforcements for the european comment moving forward. This Panel Discussion today really forms part of the councils longstanding work on defense and security in northern europe. We are focused on a number of key issues including natos maritime domain, cyber threats, and natoeu cooperation. Iner the rubric of security northern europe, we have conducted a range of activities, including wargames. We have led factfinding delegations to the region and published results Oriented Research and policy recommendations. Ax weeks ago, we hosted highprofile conference in northern europe, which featured all of the baltic defense ministers and leading american voices. This Panel Discussion is really the start of our work. This withturn to outcomes of the exercise and we will also watch it closely using our capabilities and Digital Forensics lab some of which has previously tracked in the you came ukraine in syria and used visual tools to uncover important effects from the ground that are sometimes easy to miss for a policy audience. Toe of the work related today can be picked up outside of this room. None of this work wouldve been possible without our Close Partnership with estonias minister of defense. Thank you very much to you and the ministry for working very closely with us in making the work possible and bringing some of these perspectives to washington for discussion. We have a great panel lined up for today. Therefrom estonia, norway and the United States, and some of the greatest thinkers. Im sure you will find the conversation both fascinating and lively. We also look board to bringing all of you into the conversation during the q a session. We are Live Streaming this event and if you want to engage with us, please use the designated please usee my htag. Esignated hast expert is an expert on russian and regional affairs. He served as the Baltic Center for russian studies and is the editor in chief of the largest newspaper in the baltic region. He served for many years as the newspapers correspondent in moscow at a crucial time. Voicesne of the leading in transatlantic unity. Thank you so much for being with us today. The floor is yours. [applause] thank you and thank you to team here at the Atlantic Council putting together this extremely interesting seminar today, this morning. It is very timely, as we see from interest in the audience it also generates interest and questions. Allow me as a historian to go back a little bit from where we are today. To understand to my understanding, the Current Situation both in relations to western russia and regarding these exercises. We have to see the bigger picture. This is only part of it. To be pretty clear, russia is the only country today in the world who has National Strategy , and has been ready for a long time to confront nato as an enemy and perhaps even destroy nato and the United Security terms of architecture in your atlantic area built by the leadership of the United States. Russia is the only country who constantly exercises and strategically building up muscle memory for its military for total war against the best. Recent exercises at least since of antiwestents warfare. Of course this suits perfectly to their own historical roots. Saidnder the third set the only real allies are the army. Perhaps you could add nukes as thisor cyber warfare good all makes sense in the consolidation of the society. Stillget also that russia is waging modern war against the ukraine. It perhaps gives the best example, and the formation that russia has not changed since the break up of the soviet union. Time forget, the first this soviet union had these exercises already was in 1973. It was the biggest military exercise ever organized by the ussr. It was a show of force against nato and poland, which had an internal crisis of a time. But what is different from times of 81 and 84, the only element i see what has changed since then is the location of front line. Instead, denmark and danish trading, we have the Baltic States and poland as front linked nations. Going back to the 80s, i found an interesting paper written by who is now the rear admiral in the u. S. Navy. In 1983, he was a student at the Monterey School researching security aspects of the baltic sea. That time he stressed that since the end of world war ii had a clear strategic advantage. This created a situation where they are waiting nuclear war. The soviet union could win a strategic victory by attacking danish straits. What is most striking is the gave tot every Nation Security environment in the baltic region 34 years ago feels as if it were written yesterday. He concluded, and i quote him here. There is a case for looking a new at prepositioning, including both men and women. With the current level of technology, modern warfare proceeds very quickly and allows little time for mobilization. Philosophy ofary reinforcement from before no longer has a degree of military agility that it possessed a few years ago. The alliance must rid itself of the idea that any defensive response or preparatory response is perceived as provocation by the kremlin. Allied defenses that are caneived to be weak constitute to aggression. This was written in 1983. Hardly anything has changed. Only really, the geographical proximity we talked about. Withld like to conclude very strong formation from estonia, we have seen a strong response from nato since russian aggression both actually in 2008 against georgia and specifically since 2014 against ukraine, it has been relatively moderated. What is most important is the byty, which is played out the last two or three summits of nato, have given quite a strong signal. For its core goal to defend its allies by article building up what is important, so than we see these exercises happening on our borders. Of course, in our political debates we are firmly , believing in our own necessity believing we do gdpbest we can, and 3 of allocated to defense this year. I tell you there is no Political Force in estonia who argues against these thoughts to work perhaps in terms of increasing even the Defense Budget if its really needed. Another area where estonia has paid a lot of attention recently is the solid Early Warning procedures, including also investing in intelligence. That allows politicians like me to be very well briefed constantly and that makes, of course, the quality of political decisions much higher. These were a few of my remarks. I hope to hear very interesting debate today. Thank you. [applause] thank you. My assignment today is to provide additional context for understanding of what we may be seeing this september. In that sense, im following along very much. The messages that you heard from marco, and what you will be hearing from me is why these things dont exist in a vacuum. To understand them and interpret them, there are a lot of other considerations that we need to Pay Attention to, including history. What i thought i would do then is start with a few words about what we know about the exercise itself and then look at some of the immediate precursors to it, and what those precursors, some of the earlier exercises may suggest about what we will see now. And then say a few words at the end about some of the issues it may raise for the rest of us, what we should be paying attention to. As im sure many in the audience know, this is a joint strategic exercise. It is planned to take place in western russia. It will be a multinational exercise, encompassing both russian and belarusian forces. It will clearly include land forces, aerospace forces, air andnse, Logistic Support probably interior ministry and other troops, as well, at least in some form. It is likely, i think, and for reasons i will explain in more to coincidemoment, or overlap with other exercises or Training Drills which may not be formally identified as part of this, but clearly linked to them. Weve seen this before. Ill come back to this. Its overall size is uncertain on detail, but all indications are it could be very very large and may be the largest one we have seen since the end of the cold war. It has, not surprisingly, evoke a lot of attention in some considerable concern among russias neighbors. Nato in general. Why should we care about this . Why should we Pay Attention . Military, all serious exercise the troops, they do it regularly. Why is this different . It seems to me there are two basic reasons that are interrelated. One has to do with what exercises can tell us about the thinking of political leaders. What is it they worry about . What kinds of conflicts do they think are possible and should be planned for . What kinds of messages they want to can day to convey to potential adversaries and others. And secondly, what exercises can suggest or remind us about broader trends in the security environment. In general, and in Russian Defense planning in particular. As i mentioned before, these exercises dont take place in a vacuum. The context matters. What i am going to do to followup is simply to say a few words about what we have seen in recent exercise history, Say Something about the issues this may raise for the present and is in return to this year and try to suggest what it is we should pay particular attention to, especially in light of the broader trends we see in Russian Defense planning and the broader European Security environment. First a bit of exercise history. As marco said, the soviet union and then russia has been doing this exercise for long time. They are regularly planned and announced at fouryear intervals. The two most recent ones took place in 2009 and 2013. The 2013 exercise has some aspects which are very much worth noting as we look ahead to this september. It was, first of all, there is a question of what its purpose was. This september. It was charactere russian official statements as essentially an antiterrorist exercise. When you look at what happened , it is pretty hard to believe that thats really all that this was about. Clearly it was exercising and testing mobilization and deployment, including newly formed units of command and control arrangements and the like. I think well see a lot more of it this time. A second characteristic has to do with its size. 2013, russia was still following the vienna document conventions of reporting upcoming exercises. They are not doing that anymore. The vienna document. Their declaration was that it was going to be on the order of 20,000 troops. There were several problems with this exercise. It that it looks like appears that the only thing they were announcing was the Ground Forces that were involved. In fact, there were a lot of other troops that were involved. Either directly or in other activities that were closely linked. Air forces, logistic forces, railroad troops, interior ministry and the like. Those numbers were considerable. When you add those forces to the 22,000, you get about 70,000 in total. In addition, there was a very large interior ministry exercise at the same time involving roughly 25,000 troops. If you include that, the total comes close to 100,000. Whatever was going on, what ever it however we characterize and however much we decided was this or something else, there are a lot of closely linked activities of considerable size much larger than russia officially announced. Again, there is sort of an obvious point for 2017. It too, i think, will be very large. Ongoingbe part of an and conference of exercise and , weve seenle elements the summer was more apparently coming soon. How large exactly is not clear. Theres not going to be a notification this time. But the reports is that russia is going to be mobilizing several thousand trains to transport the troops. Several thousand. If this is too, this is several orders of magnitude larger than anything we have seen before. It is much larger, for example, then what we saw in 2013. We could be seeing in september is the largest, most complicated, most ambitious exercise since the cold war. Now, what therefore should we be looking for in the upcoming history, given the history and the water trends broader trends in Russian Defense planning . Marco gotndant into a lot of it. There has been quite a bit of hype about what Russian Military forces look like. There arel still constraints of them in the future, both economic and demographic. That the general trend is that this is a force that is much more mobile, has more confident units that can move faster and quicker than what we have seen before. , under quite plausible scenarios that can produce ratios of a song the region in the region that are unfavorable to nato. This is not a question of what Russian Forces look like against nato in general, but sencenarios that could cause nato trouble in the region. There have been a lot of western concerns both in the region for nato officials and here in washington. We will hear more about those from the panel, so i wont go into great detail, but let me mention a couple. But not dramatic, frequent is that this may be preparation for some kind of direct military action. I understand the reason for this. It has happened before. There was an exercise which followed very quickly by interventions in the borders, in 2007. The same thing happened in the georgia war in 2008. Having said that, i think direct military action personally is very unlikely. I dont think russia is looking to start a war with nato. But i do worry about two other things. Implausible is less is incidents along the border, provocations, poking around the region. As a result, possibility of accidents. You know, we are going to need to be careful about this, and i hope they are to. Too. E i cant rule out the possibility of trouble associated with this. But even if none of that happens , what then should we care about . I would mention a couple of things that we should pay particular attention to. One, as i mentioned before, is simply the size, and what does this tell us about russian planning and defense planning and perspective . Another is the scenario. There will be one thing which we they described as. My guess is it will not be entirely candid about what the exercise is meant to do, but we will need to make some judgments about what it is they seem to be testing. My guess is it will be, as before, mobilization issues, inloyment issues and particular, command and control, because the rep and structural changes in the military districts in russia and in some of the units. What kinds of forces are involved, what rules recent of life what roles they seem to play, to what extent they look like they reflect changes in the force structure, because for a considerable period certainly early 2000,the russia was moving to smaller, more mobile brigades. The rationale is they were more concerned about smaller, local wars around their borders. There started to move back of new, larger forces. We want to see how they are used. In particular, implications for force generation. Also need to talk about how good our own intelligence is. Well need to be thinking hard about this. Well be looking at this. One of things for me to assess afterwards is what actually did we see. Advance . Did we know in this will have implications for warning questions in our own force planning. How much warning can we expect to have is something were to go wrong. Final element to note is the nuclear element. They have seen divorce from the conventions of the conventional forces, in part because be a heard a lot of officialsrom russian about the integration of Nuclear Forces and conventional forces. A lot of talk about the escalations,a of to deescalate. Well have to Pay Attention to that too. Finally, one final point. In addition to the operational purposes of exercises, which are at the core, exercises also send messages. Often by design. In many cases, russia has been quite explicit about the messages. When the question for us to think about afterward is what are the political messages these are intended to convey . Do they simply want to warn us that they are tough and we should leave them alone . In other words, the political message is defensive, as they claim. Do they want to make us nervous and therefore accommodate in ways consistent with some of their other objectives in the region . Do they want to make us numb . That is, keep doing this without following up so that at some point we will start paying less attention and less concern about the exercises we see very close to nato borders. These are not mutually exclusive. Sorting them out will not be a simple matter, but it is someth