The government has decided that a Swedish battalion will participate in the Canadian-led NATO force in Latvia, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson said. He added that this could happen as early as 2025.
The P7 regiment, which is currently stationed in the south of Sweden near the city of Lund, will be sent to Latvia. The units are to cross the Latvian-Russian border using AMV 360 armored vehicles, Stridsfordon 90 infantry fighting vehicles and possibly Leopard tanks.
The Swedish regiment will be part of the Enhanced Forward Force (EFP), an allied force on NATO's eastern flank. EFP forces in Latvia are over 2,000. The soldiers are commanded by a Canadian.
Sweden warns citizens. “War May Begin”
Earlier, Commander-in-Chief of the Swedish Armed Forces Mikael Budden and Swedish Defense Minister Karl-Oscar Bullin urged citizens not to rely on more than 200 years of peace and to prepare for the possibility of war.
Bulin reminded the citizens of Ukraine, which has been defending itself from Russian invasion since February 2022. It was the war started by Vladimir Putin that forced Stockholm to apply for NATO membership. He did the same Finland, which has already become a member of the alliance. Sweden is still waiting for the green light from Turkey and Hungary, which have yet to confirm their country's NATO membership.
Before that, experts from the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP) called on NATO countries to prepare for a possible armed conflict with Russia in the next 6-10 years. How much do they think Moscow will need to rebuild its army to attack NATO after the end of the intense fighting in Ukraine?
The first victims of Russian aggression may be Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, but also Poland.
War in Ukraine. Sikorsky: Poland is the front line, a hypothetical battlefield
The new foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, announced in May of last year that Poland was at war UkraineIt has become a “front-line state and, hypothetically, a battlefield, so it must prepare the military for territorial defense, coastal defense, and countering cyber attacks.”
– If Putin wins, we will have Russian troops on almost half of our borders. In addition, it threatens to use nuclear weapons, which is not completely excluded, Sikorsky said.
Poland is the only NATO country that neighbors both the aggressor Russia (through the Konigsberg district in the north of the country) and the defender Ukraine (to the southeast).
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