Here. Im magnus. Im the director of the initiative here at the Atlantic Council. Its great to see such a big crowd in july for this event. I also want to add a special welcome to our guests who have travelled far to be here today. Michael mickleson whos the chairman. And christian, who is the under secretary for defense policy at estonias ministry of defense. As some of you may know, christian served previously here at the embassy in washington so its great to see him back in town. So im just going to say a few words before we let our experts and representatives loss. This is important and why were doing this here at the Atlantic Council. So this is clearly a summer of or a big summer of exercises in europe. Two major nato exercises just wrapped up in Northern Europe. And nato also just completed a big exercise off the coast of ice lan. In the very near future, the focus will shift to the black sea region where nato will conduct a number of exercises as well. This is obviously all in response to a russia that continues to be assertive in and around europe and elsewhere. And its clearly bent on altering the european secretary order in its including with military power. Special interest to the broader Atlantic Security committee. It can tell us quite a bit about russias intentions and its growing capabilities. Previous iterations of this exercise have given us clues to russias ability to, for example, rapidly mobilizing and moving across distances and integrating ground, air and sea power. Have also given us a window into russia thinking. Including the use of Ballistic Missiles and even nuclear weapons. So this exercise is important not only for us here in washington but also in nato and brussels. And for other allied capitals for us all to keep an eye on. Obviously this session is an important opportunity to provide a bit of a public preview. Of what could be expected in the coming months. As the exercise draws closer. And what the longterm implications are for the u. S. , nato and all its members in terms of the terms, in terms of defense, in terms of reinforcements for the european continent moving forward. So this Panel Discussion today really forms part of the councils longstanding work on defense and deterrence. And we have focused on a number of key issues including natos enhanced forward presence. Natos maritime domain. Cyber and other threats. And nato eu cooperation to meet some challenges. The rubric of Northern Europe, we have conducted a range of activities including war games. Weve led factfinding delegations to the regions. And published results and policy recommendations. Actually just six weeks ago, we hosted a highprofile public conference on defense and deterrence in Northern Europe which featured all of the defense ministers z s and retir voices. So this Panel Discussion is really the start of our work. And we will return to this theme with analysis of outcomes of exercise and we will also watch it closely using our capabilities and our Digital Forensic research lap which has previously tracked security developments in ukraine, syria and the events surrounding the shootout using Digital Tools to uncover important facts from the ground that are sometimes easy to miss for a policy audience. And some of the work related can be picked up in the hall just outside this room. But of course none of this work that were doing would have been possible without our Close Partnership with estonias military defense. Christian, thank you to you and the ministry for working so closely with us and making this work possible and bringing some of these perspectives to washington for disugs k. We have a great panel lined up for today. With perspectives from estonia and norway and the United States. So im sure you will find this conversation both fascinating and lively. And we also look forward to bringing all of you into the conversation during the q and a signatu discussion. So to help us open todays discussion, we have the chairman of the Foreign Relations committee of the parliament of estonia. He also heads estonias dell to the nato parliamentary assembly. Having first been elected to parliament in 2003. He also brings a distinguished expert as an expert on regional affairs. He has served as the director of the Baltic Center for studies and is the editor in chief of the largest newspapers in the baltic region. He everybody issed fserved for crucial time of Political Developments in russia. One of the leading voices about influence of transatlantic unity, cohesion within nato. Thank you for being with us today. And the floor is yours. [ applause ] thank you, magnus. Thank you, you and your team here in Atlantic Council putting together this extremely interesting seminar today, this morning. It is of course very timely as we see from audience. Also generates a lot of perhaps both interest and questions. But allow me to be in my few remarks as historian. Going a little bit back from the day were living in today. To understand in my understanding and our understanding in estonia the current situation. Both in relation between western russia and also regarding the exercises. We have to see the bigger picture. And it is of course only part of it. To be pretty clear, russia is the only country today in the world who has National Strategy and this is already for a long time to confront nato as an enemy. And perhaps even destroy nato and the United States at least in terms of current Security Architecture in your atlantic area built by the leadership of the United States. Russia is the only country who constantly exercising and strategically building up its military muscle memory for total war against the west. All recent exercises at least since zapa 2009 had elements of antiwest warfare. Of course, this suits perfectly to their own historical roots. Alexen de iii said the only real allies for russia are the navy and the army. Perhaps today you could add their nukes as well. Or cyber fare. And of course this all makes sense in the consolidation of society. Dont forget also that russia still is today in modern war against major european country, ukraine. Zapa perhaps gives the best example. That russia has not changed since breakup of soviet union. Dont forget the first time russia had, or soviet union had the zapat exercises in 1973. Zapat 81 bawas the biggest eve. That was show of force against nato and somehow against poland which had internal crisis at the time. But what is different from times of zapat 8 is or zapat 84 . The only element i see changed since then is the location of front line. Instead, denmark and danish straights, we ha straits, we have now poland. Going back into 80s. I found very interesting paper written by the now rear admiral of u. S. Navy. In 1983, he was student at the monterey naval school researching the security aspects of the baltic sea. That time, he addressed, since the end of world war ii, ussr. Hes created a situation there, avoiding nuclear war. The soviet union could win strategic victory by suddenly attacking the danish straits. What is most striking actually is the fact that the recommendation gave to the security environment in the baltic region 34 years ago feel also as if it were written yesterday. He concluded, and i quote him here. In a baltic, there is commanding cation for looking a new at prepositioning including both men and equipment. With the current level of technology, modern warfare proceeds very quickly and allows little time for mobilization. The expeditionary philosophy of reinforcement from afar no longer has a degree of military or political utility that it possessed a few years ago. The alliance must rid itself of the idea that any defensive or preparatory response to soviet expansion is in itself perceived as provocation by the crekremli. Allied defenses can constitute aggression. This was written in 1983. Hardly anything has changed. Only really the geographical proximity we talk about. I would like to conclude with very strong information from the side of estonia that we have seen strong response from nato since russian aggression both actually in 2008 against georgia and specifically from 2014 against ukraine. This has been relatively moderate but firm. Unity which has played out to loss or even summits of nato has given quite a strong and clear signal. But nato is to work for its core goal, defend its allies by article 5. Building up deterrence. Which is important of course. Then we see these exercise on our borders. Eaststonia in our political debates, were very firmly believing into our own necessity. I tell you there is no Political Force in estonia who argues against this. In terms of perhaps even increasing the Defense Budget if its really needed. Another area where estonia has built a lot of attention recently is Early Warning procedures. Including also investing into our intelligence. Which allows politicians like me to be very well briefed constantly. And that makes of course the quality of political decisions much higher than otherwise. 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 2017. In that sense, following along very much, in the messages that you heard from marco, and what youll be hearing from me is why these things dont exist in a vacuum. That to understand them and interpret them, there are a lot of other considerationings 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 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. What im sure many in the audience know zapat is a strategic sgroint exercise. It is planned this time to take place in western russia, belarus. It will be a multinational exercise including both belarus forces. Air defense, Logistic Support and probably interior ministry and other troops as well. At least in some form. It is likely, i think, and for reasons ill explain in more detail in a moment, to coincide or overlap with some other exercises and Training Drills which may not be formally identified as part of zapat, but look clearly linked to them. Weve seen this before. Ill come back to this. Its overall size is uncertain on detail but all indications are this is going to be very, very large. And may, indeed, be the largest one weve seen since the end of the cold war. It has, not surprisingly, evoked a lot of attention and some considerable concern among russias neighbors. And at nato in general. Now, why, why should we care about this . Why should we Pay Attention . After all, all military exercise their troops. They do it regularly. Why is this different . Seems to me there are two basic reasons. Which are interrelated. One has to do with what exercises in general can tell us about the thinking of military planners and political leaders. What is it they worry about . What kinds of conflicts do they think should be planned for . What kinds of messages they want to convey to adversaries and more. And secondly, what exercises can suggest or remind us about broader trends in the security environment. In general in Russian Defense planning in particular. As i mentioned before, these exercises dont take place in a vacuum. The context matters. So what im going to do then to follow up is simply to say a few words about what weve seen in recent exercise history, Say Something about the issues this may raise for the president and then return and try to suggest what it is we should pay particular attention to especially in the broader trends we see in Russian Defense planning and in the broader European Security environment. So first a bit of exercise history. As marco said, the soviet union and then russia has been doing zapat or west exercises for a 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. First of all theres a question of what its purpose was. It was characterized by some 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 some 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. In 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 zapat 2013 was going to be on the order of 20,000, 22,000 troops. Now, there were several problems with this exercise. One is it looked like it appears the only thing they were actually announcing were the Ground Forces that were involved. And, in fact, there were a lot of other troops that were involves. Either what looked like either directly or in other activities, it seemed to be closely linked. Air force, 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, then the total comes close to 100,000. So the yb of what w you know,s going on, however we characterize it, however much we decide there are a lot of closely linked activities of considerable size much larger than russia officialally announced. Now, again, theres sort of an obvious point for zapat 2017. It, too, i think will be very large. It will be part of an ongoing and very comprehensive exercise and Training Cycle which weve seen already. Weve seen elements of it this summer with more apparently coming soon. How large exactly is not clear. Theres not going to be a ose notification this time. But there are reports, one indication, that russias going to be mobilizing several thousand trains to transport the troops, several thousand. If this is true, this is several orders of magnitude larger than anything weve seen before. It is much larger, for example, than what we saw in 2013. As i say, what 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 and upcoming history, given this history, given in particular the broader trends in Russian Defense planning. Marco referreded to a lot of it. I think people here know it well. I wont go into it in detail. But what theres been quite a bit of hype about what Russian Military forces look like. There are still constraints on them in the future. Both economic and demographic. Having said all that, what is clear is what the general trends are. That this is a force which is much more mobile, has more competent units which can move faster and quicker than what weve seen before, and in ways under quite plausible scenarios that can produce force ratios at least in the along the borders in the regions that are quite unfavorable to nato. This is not a question of what Russian Forces look like against nato in general. But scenarios that could cause nato a lot of trouble in the immediate region. Now, there have been a lot of as i mentioned before, a lot of western concerns both in the region from nato officials and here in washington. We will hear more about those from the panel so i wont go into great detale. Let me mention a couple. The most dramatic but not frequent is that it may be some kind of direct military action. I understand the reasons for this. It has happened before. There was some there was an exercise in 2007. Which followed very quickly by interventions in the borders. The same thing happened with the georgia war in 2008. Looks like a link. Having said that, i think direct military action, personally, i think is very unlikely. I dont think russia is looking to start a war with nato. I do worry about other things. One, which i think is less than plausible, is incidents along the border. Provocations poking around the region. As a result possibility of accidents. You know, we are going to need and we will need to be careful about this. I hope they are too. Even if theres something dramatic like that, i cant rule out the possibility of some 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 is simply the size and what this tells us about russian planning and defense planning and perspectives. Another is the scenario. There will be one thing which we describe to us. My guess is it will be deployment issues and particular command and control because there have been structural changes in the military districts in russia and in some of the units, what forces are involved, what roles they seem to play, to what extent they look like they reflect changes in the force structure for some period russia was moving away to smaller more mobile brigades. And they professed rationale was that they were more concerned about smaller local wars around their borders. Theyve started to move back a bit. Creating new Larger Forces of division size. We want to see how theyre used. And, in particular, as i say, implications for for