In Eastern Europe, U.S. Military Girds Against Russian Might and Manipulation

By Eric Schmitt

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First, four Army Stryker armored vehicles collided, sending 15 soldiers to the hospital with minor injuries. But hours later, an anti-American blog claimed a child was killed and posted a photo of the accident. Lithuanian media quickly denounced the blog post as a doctored fake, designed to turn public opinion against the Americans and their Baltic ally. The bloggers had borrowed a page from the playbook of Russia’s so-called hybrid warfare, which American officials say increasingly combines the ability to manipulate events using a mix of subterfuge, cyberattacks and information warfare with conventional military might.

I Troops dispersed into smaller groups to simulate how to avoid sophisticated surveillance drones that could direct rocket or missile attacks against personnel or command posts.CreditLaetitia Vancon for The New York Times

The military exercise, which involved 18,000 American and allied troops, offers a window into how Army commanders are countering not just Russian troops and tanks, but also twisted truths. The exercise occurred as President Trump is sidling up to Moscow by bad-mouthing NATO, calling for Russia to be readmitted into the Group of 7 industrialized nations, and planning a summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia next month.

American commanders say they are tuning out Mr. Trump’s comments — strengthening ties to allied armies, increasing the number of troops and spies devoted to Russia, and embracing Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s newest defense strategy that focuses more on potential threats from Russia and China and less on terrorism.

“The Russians are actively seeking to divide our alliance, and we must not allow that to happen,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned separately in a speech in France the day after the June 7 accident in Lithuania.

Over the past year, the United States and its NATO allies completed positioning about 4,500 soldiers in the three Baltic States and Poland, and have stationed several thousand other armored troops mostly in Eastern Europe as a deterrent to Russian aggression.

The road march was a proving ground for enhanced technology, such as new, small reconnaissance drones and electronic-jamming equipment to thwart Russian probes.CreditLaetitia Vancon for The New York Times

In Brussels, allied defense ministers met recently in advance of a NATO summit meeting in July and approved a plan to ensure that by 2020, at least 30,000 troops, plus additional attack planes and warships, can respond to aggressions within 30 days.

These tensions are part of an expanding rivalry and military buildup, with echoes of the Cold War, between Washington and Moscow.

The doctored photo of the Army accident in Lithuania was just the latest reminder of what American officials called Russia’s increasing reliance on cyberattacks and information warfare to keep its rivals off balance.

Last year, for instance, Lithuanian prosecutors investigated a claim of rape against German soldiers who were stationed in Lithuania as part of a NATO mission to deter Russia. Ultimately, the report turned out to be false. Moscow denied being involved in any disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting troops, but the incident was widely viewed as an attempt to sow divisions among the allies.

Moscow is flexing its conventional might, too, sending military forces for its own exercises along its western border with Europe and also to Syria and eastern Ukraine. Additionally, Russia is building up its nuclear arsenal and cyberwarfare prowess in what American military officials call an attempt to prove its relevance after years of economic decline and retrenchment.

In response, the Pentagon has stepped up training rotations and exercises on the territory of newer NATO allies in the east, including along a narrow 60-mile-wide stretch of rolling Polish farmland near the Lithuanian border northeast of here called the Suwalki Gap. The corridor is sandwiched between the heavily militarized Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Moscow’s ally Belarus, and is considered NATO’s weak spot on its eastern flank.

In the unlikely event of a land war, American and allied officers say, the region is where Russia or its proxies could cut off the Baltic States from the rest of Europe. Since Russia annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, Eastern Europe has felt increasingly vulnerable.

“Putin is a bird of prey,” said Piotr Lukasiewicz, a retired Polish Army colonel and former Polish ambassador to Afghanistan. “He preys on weak states.”

A mobile American command post in northeastern Poland reflects the Army’s new realities in Eastern Europe, where soldiers accustomed to operating from large, secure bases in Iraq and Afghanistan are disguising their positions with camouflage netting.CreditLaetitia Vancon for The New York Times

The Polish government has offered to pay the United States up to $2 billion to build a permanent military base in the country, an offer the Trump administration is weighing cautiously. American forces are, apparently for the first time, flying unarmed Reaper surveillance drones from a Polish base in the country’s northwest. Nearly 2,000 Special Operations forces from the United States and 10 other NATO nations carried out one of their biggest exercises ever — Trojan Footprint 18 — in Poland and the Baltics this month.

Elsewhere in Europe, Norway agreed two weeks ago to increase the number of American Marines training there regularly, to 700 from 330, drawing an angry protest from Moscow