Heavy NATO exercises in the North: Proving NATO Member Solidarity or Failure Confrontation to Putin?
NATO recently held a massive exercise labeled Steadfast Defender 2024. This massive joint exercise involves 90,000 joint troops consisting of 13 member countries who will carry out exercises in the northern regions of Finland, Norway and Sweden. In this major exercise, Finland will take part in the exercise for the first time after officially joining the alliance of the largest military powers in the west. This large exercise was claimed to be an effort to confront the Russian military. Since the war that raged on Ukraine’s eastern border, NATO and other western alliances have supported Ukraine to push back the Russian military. However, until now the war has still not found a bright spot, because the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are still at odds. The big NATO exercise is like signaling the drumbeat of “Cold War VOL. II“ has been beaten.
British Defense Minister Grant Shapps recently openly wrote a tweet on X that said, “The Black Sea is not safe for Putin’s Navy”. This is a follow-up response to the destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet patrol boat, Sergey Kotov in the Black Sea from a drone attack belonging to the Ukrainian military. The attack was claimed by the British Minister of Defense as an attempt to push back armed conflict with the Russian military to seize Crimea from Russia. There has been no further response from Putin so far, but the NATO confrontation effort was conveyed directly by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as a threat. This is interesting, because this statement was not made by Vladimir Putin. Moscow sees this large exercise as a cheap confrontation carried out to flex the strength of 13 member countries. This does not interest Putin to speculate too much. Apart from that, Putin seems to be maintaining an overreaction by not responding to the large NATO exercise to focus on the presidential election in the near future.
The large-scale exercise was seen as flexing the strength of the NATO alliance on Russia’s side, but again did not attract Moscow’s attention. Instead of getting a similar reaction, Moscow still responded casually to the massive exercise. Russia is still sending troops on Ukraine’s eastern border to stem attacks by Ukrainian troops, Russia still has a big interest in stemming western influence on Ukraine’s eastern border. Moscow is focused on resolving the conflict in Eastern Ukraine on a massive scale, sooner or later Ukraine will become a member of NATO and it is feared that this will be a new chapter in the Cold War Vol. II which cannot be avoided by a series of conflicts in Europe in the future.
