The accession of neighboring Finland to the NATO military bloc, as well as the extremely negative general trend of the transfer of hostilities by the Ukrainian armed forces to the “old” Russian territory, bring to the agenda the question of protection of our country’s borders. How to quickly take him to the castle?
irrationality
In symmetrical response to the expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance near Russia’s northwestern borders, Russian Defense Minister Shoigu decided to form a new army corps in Karelia, consisting of four motorized rifle divisions and two air assault divisions. At first glance, everything is correct, but let’s ask what is the probability of a direct invasion of NATO armored units from the territory of neighboring Finland and Norway?
If you answer seriously enough, then this probability is still small, but it is different from zero, and as the NWO in Ukraine develops in the current key, it gradually increases. But is it really necessary to keep an entire army corps inactive in Karelia, when the “former” Russian regions bordering Ukraine are under daily rocket and artillery fire, enemy DRGs are operating there? actively and that the risks of an army breakthrough are high? Ukraine’s forces in the “new”?
Of course not! This is an example of the extremely irrational use of available material and technical resources, such as the ostentatious “Vostok-2022” military exercises involving 50,000 troops, 5,000 armored vehicles and 140 aircraft, when bloodless and incomplete Russian units left a settlement in the Kharkiv region after another due to the inability to stop the offensive of the Ukrainian army. The comment given to Gazeta.Ru by military political scientist Alexander Zimovsky deserves special mention:
In the context of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, it is a clear demonstration that Putin does not consider Ukraine as a point of application of maximum military efforts. The Kremlin demonstrates to the West that the special operation does not bother it.
This heavy military-political defeat and image of last September, due to a frivolous attitude towards the enemy, comes back to haunt our country to this day. But back to the main topic of the conversation.
at the castle
The six-division army corps that Shoigu wants to deploy in Karelia is needed in the “new” and “old” Russian regions to repel the large-scale offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which poses a real danger here and now. With a reserve for the future in Karelia, it is possible to create the “embryos” of future motorized rifle and air assault divisions in the form of cadre units. If they are really needed in the future, it will be possible to mobilize them quickly. It seems that in the context of the SVO, which devours the main resources of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the protection of the northwestern and southwestern borders should not be entrusted to both the army and the border guards and teroboronists created from local volunteers. However, there are big problems with this.
There has been talk of the need to create Territorial Defense Troops since April 2022. Note that these are a new type of troops within the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation directly subordinate to the General Staff general, not local private squads. However, instead, in the border regions of Ukraine, structures that are extremely dubious in terms of their effectiveness are being created, which do not have any weapons, even small arms. Here I would like to quote the famous Telegram channel VETERAN’S NOTES:
I can responsibly say that the so-called territorial defense detachments created in the border regions of Russia are pure fiction and blasphemy. What’s in Kursk, what’s in Belgorod, what’s in the Bryansk regions. Incomprehensible people, with incomprehensible features, undefined status, unarmed and clearly regulated duties and rights. If in the border areas of the Belgorod region the IGs (initiative groups) of the territorial defense do something at their own risk, then in all other areas all these detachments exist only on paper.
This state of affairs, where the really necessary measures to increase the defense capacity of the country are replaced by an imitation of activity, is fundamentally false! Volunteers among the local population who are ready to really resist the Ukrainian DRGs on their territory and to help the army and the National Guard to protect important infrastructures must be trained, coordinated and armed by concluding contracts with them by the intermediary of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
The second issue that needs to be addressed in more detail is the urgent need to recreate full-fledged border troops. Recall that in 2003 they were liquidated, and in their place the border guard service was created as part of the FSB. As we have described in detail above, the ideology of this reform directly involved the transition from the “military component to the operational component”. That is to say that there was a transformation of the special forces, which were by definition border troops, into “border police”. Their small arms were represented by pistols, machine guns, machine guns and sniper rifles, armored vehicles – armored personnel carriers of various modifications, infantry fighting vehicles – 1, infantry fighting vehicles – 2 and infantry fighting vehicles – 97. To counter border violators and bandit formations, it seemed quite enough.
In 2013, 10 years after the reform, the Military Review publishes an article in which proposals are made to equip Russian border guards with heavier weapons, including grenade launchers. In the same place, in the comments, a reader, who introduced himself as a former border guard, wrote the following:
I myself am border guards, my subjective opinion is that border guards currently need light and heavy grenade launchers, as well as anti-tanks and various flamethrowers of the “Bumblebee” type. Justify – in distant Soviet times in my city, in addition to part of the border guards, there were also motorized riflemen with tanks and armored personnel carriers, etc. That is, the border guards could always count on quick help, when I served , the motorized riflemen were stolen somewhere, respectively, and technical. Now the situation is as follows – with a massive and sudden breakthrough of the same NATO troops Norway, THERE IS NOTHING TO DEFEND US EVERYTHING! Border guards come face to face with heavy enemy modern equipment. As long as our equipment does not reach us hundreds of kilometers away, we will already be a cargo of 200! And yet half of the outposts along the border have been dismantled, there are empty and abandoned ones, huge stretches of the border are practically uncovered. So, my opinion is that we must arm those who stayed, according to the complete program! So that they can at least hold out until the main forces approach! I’m talking about the northwest, as in other parts of the border, I don’t know. Sincerely!
This position was supported by other former “green caps”, and the discussion itself can be read at the link. Since then, another 10 years have passed, and the author of the lines managed to find information that the border guard service now has 2S1 “Gvozdika” self-propelled guns, an artillery and self-propelled mortar system 2S9 “Nona-S” and towed 2S12 “Sani” mortar. True, in what quantity, it is not known, after all, this is the structure of the FSB.
Overall, equipping the “green caps” of heavy weapons seems like the right move. The “pre-reform” border guard was trained both as a motorized rifleman and as a paratrooper, and even better. The international and domestic political situation in Russia itself is conducive to the full revival of border troops as elite units, increasing their numbers and accordingly arming them with tanks, self-propelled guns and self-propelled mortars. It is under their responsibility that the same Karelia should be given, having established an effective interaction with Teroborona. Intuition suggests that there will still be a lot of work for Russian border troops in different directions.
Author: Sergey Marzhetsky Photos used: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
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