NATO Commander: War With Russia Coming in 2017
Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview.
The Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union has been relegated to history. Now, Americans are focused on domestic concerns like the presidential election, the minimum wage, and healthcare, and internationally, our focus has shifted to the rise of the Islamic State.
And yet, for people in Baltic states like Latvia and Belarus, the pull of the Soviet Union is very real, and there's a fear that the Iron Curtain could soon come again, just like it did in Crimea two years ago.
"Belarus is [like] communism with a taste of cappuccino," Francisak Viacorka, a Belarussian youth activist and journalist, told The Takeaway. "On the same street in downtown Minsk, you can see McDonald's, and on the same street, a monument of Lenin. All of the maneuvers of the Russian Army are happening in Belarus, especially this brigade which occupied Crimea — it was trained in Belarus. So let's say Belarus is independent, but if NATO and the West don't do anything, it will just be a new dungeon for Putin expansion to Europe.”
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said that NATO is obsolete and expensive. Now, his assessment is being partially validated by the predictions of Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy commander of NATO from 2011 and 2014, and author of the book "2017: War with Russia."
Shirreff believes that the West, preoccupied and disengaged, is on a crash course with Russia. He even has gone so far to claim that the first battleground will be Latvia in May 2017. Will the Baltics become the testing ground for how far we let Putin go? Find out by listening to our interview with Shirreff - just click on the 'Listen' button above.
