Good morning, everyone and welcome to the Atlantic Council and to this event on implications for nato and the United States. I know its already getting muggy out there and were happy to share our ac with you in here. Im magnus nordegren and im the director of Transatlantic Initiative at the Atlantic Council and it is so great to see a big crowd for this event and i want to add a special welcome to our guests who have traveled far to be here today. Michael mickelson who is with the Foreign Relations committee and christian prick who is the undersecretary for defense policy at estonias ministry of defense. As some of you may know we served previously at the embassy in washington and its great to see him back in town. So im just going to say a few words before before we let our experts and leave the representatives loose, and i want to say a couple of things and why theyre important in the Atlantic Council. This is a big summer of exercises in europe. Two major nato exercises just wrapped up in Northern Europe, and baltops and nato completed a big Antisubmarine Warfare exercises off the coast of iceland and nato will conduct a number of exercises, as well and this is all in response to a russia that continues to be assertive, in and around europe and elsewhere and is clearly bent on altering the European Security order in its favor including with military power. So the recurring interest is with the transatlantic Security Committee and it can tell us about russias intentions and previous capabilities and theyve given us clues to russias ability to, for example, rapidly mobilizing and moving across the distances and integrating ground, air and sea power. Theyve given us a window into russian thinking about the issue of key capabilities during the crisis including the use of Ballistic Missiles and 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, and obviously, this session is an important opportunity and 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 of its members in terms it of the turns and in terms of defense and reinforcements for the european continent moving forward. So this Panel Discussion today forms part of the councils longstanding work on the defense and security in Northern Europe, but we have focused on a number of key issues including natos enhanced forward presence and the maritime domain, cyber and hybrid threats and nato eu cooperation to meet some of these challenges, and under security in Northern Europe, we have conduct a range of activities including war games. Weave left factfinding delegations to the region and published results oriented, and six weeks ago we hosted a highprofile conference in Northern Europe which featured all of the baltic defense ministers along with leading American Forces such as retired general breed love and sandy birshbrown. Its the start of our work and we will return to this with analysis of the outcomes of exercise and we will watch it closely using our capabilities in the research lab which has previously tracked security developments in ukraine and syria and the events surrounding the ms17 shootdown and using Digital Tools to uncover important facts from the ground that are sometimes easy to mix for a policy audience and some of the work related to the support today can be picked up just outside this room. None of this work would have been possible with our Close Partnership with estonias minister of defense and thank you so much to you and to the ministry for working so closely with us and making this work possible and bringing some of these perspectives to washington for discussion. So we have a great panel lined up for today with prospectives brought from estonia and norway and the United States in combination with one of the best thinkers about russia and the Russian Military that can be found in washington, 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 session. We are Live Streaming this event, and if you want to engage with us on social media please use the podwatch. To help us open todays discussion, we have mickelson and he also heads estonias delegation to the parliamentary assembly. He has a long record of Public Service having first been elected to parliament in 2003, and he also brings the distinguished record on russia and Regional Affairs and he has served as the director for russia studies and the editor in chief of the baltic region and before becoming the editor in chief, he served for many years at moscow at a crucial time of Political Developments in russia. They are one of the leading forces on transatlantic unity and the value of american engagement in europe. Thank you so much for being here with us today, and the floor is yours. [ applause ] thank you, magnus and your team at the Atlantic Council for putting together this interesting seminar and it is very timely as we see with the odd dwrens and generates and there are questions and allow me to be in my few remarks as historian going a little bit from the day were living in today and my understanding in estonia and the current relation between western russia and regarding the exercises. We have to see the Bigger Picture and it is only a part of it. Russia is the only country who has National Strategy to confront nato as an enemy and perhaps destroy nato and the United States at least in terms of current security architecture, in your atlantic area built on 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 best all recent exercises at least since 2009 had elements of antiwest water. Of course, this suits perfectly their own historical routes and their only real allies for russia and the navy and perhaps today with nuke as well with cyber, and this all makes sense in the consolidation of a society. Dont forget also that russia has a modern war against a major european country, ukraine. It is the best example and the information that russia has not changed since the breakup of the union. Dont forget that the first time russia had the soviet union had the exercises already in 1973 and 81 was the biggest military exercise organized by the ussr that showed a force against nato and poland which had an internal crisis at the time, but what is different from times of 81 and r8 4, and the only element that ive seen change saturday location of front line and we have now the Baltic States and poland as the nations. And going back into the 80 s, i found very interesting paper written by the rear admiral of the u. S. Navy. In 1983 he was a student at the Monterey School researching the security aspects of the baltic sea. That time he stressed that since the end of world war ii, the ussr when the satellite his a clear advantage over western countries, it created a situation of avoiding nuclear war and the soviet union could avoid strategic victory by attacking the straits. What is most striking, actually is the fact that what gaudio gave to his security environment in the baltic region 34 years ago feels as if it were written yesterday. He concluded, and i got him here, in the baltic there is a commanding case for looking at a new and prepositioning including both men and equipment. With the current level of technology, modern author proceeds very quickly and allows little time for mobilization. The expeditionary philosophy of reinforcement from, no longer has the utility that was possessed a few years ago. The alliance must rid itself of the idea that any defensive or preparatory response to soviet expansion needs in itself proceed as provocation by the kremlin. Allied defenses that are perceived to be weak can constitute invitations to aggression. And this was written in 1983 and hardly anything has changed. Only really the geographical proximity we talk about. I would like to conclude that we have seen strong response from nato with russian aggression in 2008 against georgia and specifically from 2014 against ukraine. This has been relatively moderate and third, what is most important, the unity which is played out by the loss of the summits of nato has given quite a strong and clear signal. The nato is for to work for its goal to defend its allies and by article 5 and not only in the deck la rart and building up deterrence that is important, of course, and then we see these exercises and estonia, itself, of course, on our political debates we are very firmly believing into our own necessity from giving of our side, of course, the best that we can and the 2. 2 of gdp allocated to the defense and i tell you, there are no Political Force in estonia who are obviously against the actual thoughts to work perhaps in terms of increasing the defense budget, if its really needed, and another area where estonia has a lot of tension is to build up solid 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. Once again, these were a few of my remarks, and i hope to hear a very interesting debate today. Thank you. Mrausz mrauz [ applause ] thank you, marco. My assignment today is to provide some additional context for understanding of what we are what we may be seeing this september in 2017 and that sent a following very much and the message 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 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 of what we know about the exercise itself and then look at some of the immediate precursors to it, and what they may, and what those precursors and some of the earlier exercises may suggest about what were going to see now, and then say a few words at the end about some of the issues this may raise for the rest of us, and what we should be paying attention to. As im sure many in the audience no, zapod is a joint strategic exercise and its planning this time to take place in western russia as well as belarus. It would be a multinational exercise encompassing both russian and belarusian forces. Its clearly going to include land forces, Aerospace Forces and air and 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 that 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 zapod, but look clearly linked to them. Weve seen this before, and ill come back to this. Its overall size is uncertain on detail, but all indications are that 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 of nato, in general. Now why . Why should we care about this . Why should we Pay Attention . After all, all serious militaries exercise their troops and they do it regularly. Why is this different . It seems to me that 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 that they worry about, what kinds of conflicts do they think are possible and should be planned for, what kinds of messages they want to convey to potential adversaries and others and secondly, what exercises can suggest or remind us about broader trends in the security environment . And in general and Russian Defense planning in particular . As i mentioned before, these exercises dont take place in a vacuum and the context matters. And 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 that this may raise for the present and then return to zapod 2017 itself and try toing is what it is we should pay particular attention to especially in light of 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 zapod or west exercises for a long time. They are regularly planned and announced at fouryear intervals and the two most recent ones took place in 2009 and 2013. The 2013 exercise has some aspects which are very much worth noting, i think, as we look ahead to september. It was, first of all, there is a question of what its purpose was. It was characterized by some russian official statements as an antiterrorist exercise. When you looked at what happened its pretty hard to believe that thats really all that this was about. Clearly, it was exercising and testing mobilization and the deployment including newly formed units of command and control arrangements and the like, and i think well see a lot more of it this time. A second characteristic has to do with its size, and 2013 russia was still following the vienna document conventions of reporting upcoming exercises and theyre not doing that anymore, and their declaration was that zapod 2013 was going to be on the order of 20, 22,000 troops. Now there were several problems with this exercise and one is that it appears that 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 involved either with what looked like either directly or another activity that seemed to be closely linked. Naval and air forces and Logistics Forces and Railroad Troops and interior ministry and the like. Those numbers were considerable. When you add those forces to the 22,000, youll get about 70,000 in total. In addition, there was a very large interior ministry exercise at the same time involving 25,000 troops. If you include that then the total comes through to 100,000. So whatever was going on, whatever, you know, whatever how are you we characterize it and however much we design was zapod and something else, there were a lot of closely linked activities and exercises of considerable size much larger than russia officially announced. Now, again, there is a sort of an obvious point for zapod 2017. It will be very large and it will opinion 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. There will not be an osc notification at this time and the report is one indication that russia is going to be mobilizing several thousand trains to transport the troops. Several thousand. If this is true, there are several orders of magnitude larger than anything weve seen before, and its much larger, for example, than what we saw in 2013. As i say, what were seeing is more complicated and most ambitious exercise since the cold war. Now what, therefore should we be given in this history and given the broader trends in Russian Defense planning. Marco referred it a lot of it. I think people here know it well. I wont go into it in detail, but 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 are general trends are that this is a force which is much more mobile as 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 along the borders and the regions that are quite unfavorable to nato. This is not a question of what Russian Forces look like against nato in general and scenarios that could cause nato a lot of trouble in the immediate region. There have been a lot of as i mentioned before a lot of western concerns both in the region from nato officials from here in washington. We will hear about those from the panel so i wont go into great detail, but let me just mention a couple. The most dramatic, but not frequent is that this may be a preparation for some kind of of a direct military action. I understand the reasons for this. This has happened before and there was an exercise in 2007, and 2007 which followed very quickly by interventions in the borders and the same thing happened with the georgia war in 2008 that 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, but i do wo