World War 3 Alert: Vladimir Putin Orders Massive New Military Draft, Trump Threatens U.S. Will Leave NATO
Despite the controversy over Russia’s interference in the United States presidential election, a scandal that has thrown the U.S. government into turmoil, Russian President Vladimir Putin is continuing his own apparent World War 3 preparations with no pause in Russia’a massive military buildup, ordering another 142,000 young Russian men drafted into the army and announcing that brand new state-of-the art missile systems capable of delivering nuclear warheads will total nearly three of every four weapons in the Russian missile arsenal before the year is out, according to an official report by the Russian government news agency TASS on Thursday.
Putin announced the new draft in late March, following a period the previous October through December when 152,000 men were drafted into the Russian army on Putin’s orders, according to TASS. The fall draft came after a spring call-up when Putin conscripted 155,000 Russian men between the ages of 18 and 27 into the country’s armed forces — after drafting 147,100 in the latter months of 2015.
The Russian military buildup has so alarmed nearby European countries and NATO members, that Sweden also announced earlier this year that it would bring back the draft for the first time since 2010, conscripting 4,000 men and women born in 1999 into that country’s military starting in January of next year, according to a BBC report.
Sweden is a nonaligned nation, but though not part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, works closely with NATO on security issues — a relationship that has strengthened over the past year in response to the Russian military buildup.
But Donald Trump on Wednesday issued an explicit warning to the United States’ NATO allies that the U.S. will pull out of NATO unless other countries in the historic 68-year-old alliance make the monetary payments that Trump has demanded, according to a report by the French news network France 24.
The threat was revealed by an unnamed senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to the news organization.
“We’ll either see real changes towards NATO or we’ll try to form a different way of going about things”, the senior White House source said. “We don’t want to be paying for everyone’s defense. The one thing that he (Trump) doesn’t have patience for is this kind of lip service.”
A pullout by the United States would leave NATO significantly weakened and much of Eastern Europe vulnerable to war, thanks to stepped up aggression by Putin and Russia, experts believe.
“The possibility of Putin invading the Baltics is real. Many traditional foreign policy observers didn’t believe Putin would invade Georgia in 2008, but he did,” wrote Russia expert Terrell Starr on the military affairs site Foxtrot Alpha earlier this year. “It is assumed that Putin would not attack a NATO country because of the military alliance. But given that Trump has been very hostile towards NATO, who is to say that Putin won’t invade when his past actions prove otherwise?”
Full quote from senior White House official on Trump threat to leave #NATO right here: pic.twitter.com/RTbOq2vg1w
— Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) May 17, 2017
At a Russian government meeting on the military buildup on Thursday, Putin declared that while 62 percent of Russian Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles — the type used in a nuclear attack — were now in next generation, high-tech mobile and silo-based systems, the modernization program would cause that percentage to rise to 72 percent by the end of 2017, according to the official TASS report.
The Russian Navy is also undergoing a significant upgrade, Putin added, with the current 47 percent share of next generation Navy weapons systems project to rise to 55 percent in 2017.
[Featured Image By Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Images]
