Pentagon 'watching' as Russia steps up aggression in Eastern Europe
The Pentagon is on alert as Russia steps up its activity in Eastern Europe and the Arctic this week, presenting a new challenge for the young Biden administration, military officials said Wednesday.
U.S. European Command has raised its alert status to the highest level after fighting resumed between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk Region of eastern Ukraine, marking the end of a June 2020 ceasefire, and Russian forces began building up military equipment along the border.
Meanwhile, NATO jets scrambled 10 times on Monday alone to respond to an unusually high number of Russian fighter and bomber flights near allied airspace. And last week, three nuclear-armed Russian submarines punched through several feet of ice in the Arctic, a new show of force in a region American forces are challenged to reach.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for homeland defense, acknowledged the recent uptick in Russian aggression, pointing to Moscow’s efforts to “reassert its influence on a global stage.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/pentagon-watching-as-russia-steps-up-aggression-in-eastern-europe/ar-BB1fb4Lv
Putin's spies are getting sloppy: 'America isn't sending a guy to your house to kill you with a hammer, but the Russians will,' NATO official says
It was one of Russia's deepest infiltrations of NATO in recent years, and the nickname given to one of the spies was reminiscent of a John Le Carré novel: "The Resident."
There were clandestine exchanges of cash for secrets in the centre of Sofia, Bulgaria. Officials were seen counting out cash in Bulgarian government offices. And at the center of it all was a dual national Russian-Bulgarian citizen married to a top defense ministry official.
The Russian spies posing as diplomats in the Russian embassy in Sofia focused their recruiting efforts on the top echelons of the Bulgarian defense establishment, as the newest member of NATO. Their specific target, according to both Bulgarian media reports and officials who spoke to Insider, was a new NATO facility on the Black Sea.
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But in a 20-minute video released by Bulgarian intelligence a few days later, the reality was less like a slick espionage thriller: The Russians had retained a crew of bumblers whose only skill was their proximity to Bulgaria's secrets.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putins-spies-are-getting-sloppy-america-isnt-sending-a-guy-to-your-house-to-kill-you-with-a-hammer-but-the-russians-will-nato-official-says/ar-BB1fanQW?ocid=DELLDHP&li=BBnb7Kz
