BRUSSELS: Britain, Germany and the United States advanced plans on Tuesday to spearhead a new Nato force on Russia’s border from next year, but some eastern allies said the alliance’s effort must go further to deter Moscow.

Weeks before a critical Nato summit in Warsaw, three of Nato’s biggest military powers said they would each command a combat battalion across the eastern flank to help deter any show of force such as that deployed by Moscow in Crimea in 2014.

“Britain will lead one of the battalions,” British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said at a meeting of Nato defence ministers. “That should send a very strong signal of our determination to defend the Baltic states and Poland in the face of continued Russian aggression.” The battalions are part of a wider Nato deterrent to be approved at the Warsaw summit on July 8, which will involve troops on rotation, warehoused equipment and a highly mobile force backed by Nato’s 40,000-strong rapid reaction unit.

Nato hopes the complex plan can discourage Russia from orchestrating the kind of campaign used to annex Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in February 2014 and which has left eastern allies nervous of their former Soviet overlord.

Berlin and Washington also said in Brussels that they would send troops to the new force, which is expected to total about 4,000 soldiers, with contributions from other allies.

Germany is likely to deploy to Lithuania, the United States to Poland and Britain to Estonia, on a six-to-nine month rotating basis. Other Nato nations will eventually take command responsibilities, diplomats said.

Canada is expected to command a fourth battalion in Latvia, diplomats say, although Ottawa has yet to comment publicly. France is also sending a company of about 250 troops.

In addition, the United States will provide an armoured brigade, typically around 5,000 troops, plus extra equipment.

“There will be a continually present armoured brigade combat team, which will bring in its own equipment with each rotation,” said US Defence Secretary Ash Carter. He said that on top of that the United States would bring “a pre-positioned set of equipment for yet an additional armoured brigade combat team which troops could fall in upon in a crisis.”

While eastern allies welcome the deployments in Nato’s biggest military build-up since the end of the Cold War, they want more support to defend against Russia’s powerful arsenal.

With a warning last week from a senior US commander that the alliance would have only 72 hours notice of a missile or ground attack, Baltic nations and Poland want a sophisticated anti-missile shield to deter Russia from gaining the upper hand.

That could involve Nato fighter planes and surface-to-air missile interceptors on a much larger scale in the Baltics.

Southern flank allies Bulgaria and Romania, meanwhile, are pushing for Nato to expand its maritime presence in the Black Sea, where Russia has a naval fleet, as well as more alliance troops to the region.

The Black Sea is strategically important for both East and West given its energy reserves and closeness to the Middle East.

Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Nato was considering a Romanian offer to command a multinational brigade which could coordinate alliance training and possibly play a deterrent role.

Russia sees Nato’s deterrence plans as hostile. Moscow’s envoy to the alliance has warned they threaten peace in central Europe. The Kremlin also says a US ballistic missile shield, which Washington says is directed at protecting the alliance from Iran, is also escalating tensions.

The United States denies that. Nato says it is respecting a 1997 agreement with Moscow not to deploy substantial combat forces on Russia’s borders.

“You don’t invade with a few battalions, okay?” United States’ envoy to Nato, Douglas Lute, told reporters. “But you can deter, and you can affect a potential aggressor’s calculus in terms of cost, benefit and risks.”

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2016