Mark Milley, head of United States Army Forces Command, has described Russia's behavior as "aggressive" and said that it needs to be "monitored" and "confronted."
“We’re trying to assure the allies and deter the-deter any further aggressive behavior. The strategic situation with Russia is fundamentally different than it was prior to, say, 2005, 2004,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“Russia has aggressively crossed sovereign international boundaries <…> And it’s happened in Crimea, it’s happened in Georgia, it’s happened in eastern Ukraine,” he said. “And then add onto it all these aggressive incident-type behaviors, and barrel rolls over aircraft, and challenging ships, and submarine activity, and cyber activity. You add it all together and you connect those dots, that’s a fundamentally different external behavior of a nation state. And that is something that needs to be closely monitored, confronted,” the general said.
For his part, Mark Welsh, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, said that Russia’s neighbors, primarily the Baltic States, “don’t feel safe, they’re concerned.” “If you go to the Baltic States and talk to them, they’re concerned <…> If Russia decided to cross another border, could you stop them? The answer to that is probably no. Could you move them back across the border? That would be a major undertaking,” he said.
“And so that’s really the question: will we honor our alliance to NATO or not? And there’s partners all over the world watching this,” said Welsh.
