On Wednesday, five different armored vehicles were loaded up and sent through the Channel Tunnel in a secret training operation as part of preparations for a hypothetical conventional war in Europe. The vehicles, including a Challenger 2 main battle tank and several other heavy armored vehicles, were loaded onto a train and sent to France and back.
According to local media, the exercise was organized to strengthen NATO's rapid reaction force in Eastern Europe, with the British Army on the lookout for new ways to quickly deploy troops to the continent if its military bases in Germany were closed.
"The things that we have been observing in Europe for quite some time now can be described by one term: fear mongering. To the spurious allegations that Russia is 'about to attack Europe, a cheap kind of PR is added, involving the movement of equipment, and in quantities that wouldn't decide anything in case of a real war," Zhilin noted.
The deployment of more and more troops to Europe, their movement across Europe, etc., is all just part of an attempt to preserve the myth of the Russian threat, according to the officer.
The main problem with attempts to continually escalate anti-Russian hysteria, Zhilin stressed, is that if this is done every second of every day, the population can start to go crazy. Meanwhile, the reality is that it's actually NATO that's putting its offensive weapons on Russia's borders. "Who's the aggressor here?" the commentator asked.
