NATO draws up plan to “take down” Russia's Kaliningrad, says US general

NATO allies have created a plan to "take down from the ground" the Kaliningrad region of Russia faster with modern weaponry, said Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the US Army in Europe and Africa and Commander of NATO land forces.

Donahue said that the US allies, together with NATO allies, are beginning to implement the plan called the "Eastern Flank Deterrence Line." It aims to strengthen ground capabilities and enhance the cooperation of the alliance’s defence industries, Caliber.Az reports, citing a global defence portal. 

The plan is designed to counter threats from Russia and ensure global deterrence.

“We know what we have to develop and the use case that we’re using is you have to [deter] from the ground,” he said. “The land domain is not becoming less important, it’s becoming more important. You can now take down [anti-access, aerial-denial] A2AD bubbles from the ground. You can now take over sea from the ground. All of those things we are watching happen in Ukraine.”

Donahue noted, Russia’s Kaliningrad is roughly 47 miles wide and surrounded by NATO on all sides and the Army and its allies now have the capability to “take that down from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do.”

“We’ve already planned that and we’ve already developed it. The mass and momentum problem that Russia poses to us … we’ve developed the capability to make sure that we can stop that mass and momentum problem," Donahue said.

The plan includes a system to share data. NATO has already procured that system, Donahue said, referencing its choice of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence platform from Palantir that takes a vast amount of data and rapidly analyses information to help military commanders make decisions.

“We already know exactly what we have to do with cloud and we know exactly the type of actual unmanned systems, brigades, everything else that we need for that,” Donahue said.

Specifically, the Army wants these capabilities to be interoperable with NATO partners.

By Khagan Isayev