According to the newspaper, NATO has a very shabby construction which for some reason has not yet collapsed.
"After almost twenty years of joint missions abroad, the Western Alliance doesn't know how to operate as a common troop. It remains an alliance of national and technical islands and thus has structural disadvantages compared to a centrally organized military power like Russia," the article said.
Static imbalance is what the military alliance's current condition can be classifed as. Sometimes a house doesn't collapse only because its wallpaper is holding the walls, the newspaper wrote.
"We can say the same thing about NATO — supposedly the most powerful defense alliance in history — judging by their largest military exercise since the end of the Cold War," the article said.
"For us this is a matter of safety — in the Balkans, in the Baltic States," said Polish President Andrzej Duda, cited by the magazine.
Nearly 60,000 soldiers of NATO and allied countries have been participating in four series of maneuvers in the Baltic countries, Romania and Poland. Russian authorities stated that military activities near its borders pose a threat to the country's national security.
However, the newspaper called a statement of the Kremlin about military exercises near its borders "too kind" taking into account NATO's current state.
"Groans and creaks — these are the noises that NATO made during its large-scale exercise Anaconda in Poland," the author wrote.
On June 6-17, NATO held the 2016 Anaconda drills with the involvement of troops from over 20 member states of the Alliance, bringing together some 31,000 servicemen, 100 aircraft, 12 vessels and 3,000 vehicles. According to US Army Europe Commanding Gen. Ben Hodges, the exercises showed that the Alliance had several problems and was too slow compared to the Russian military.
In an interview with German media, Hodges reported numerous shortcomings which have been revealed during the exercises. One of them was the fact that heavy equipment can't be relocated from Western to Eastern Europe fast enough and that "Russia could conquer the Baltic States faster than we would be there to defend them."
