After two and a half years of NATO officials predicting imminent Russian invasions, NATO military chief Gen. Petr Pavel publicly insisted that there was no need to send any more troops to the Baltics, because there was no risk of a Russian invasion in the first place.

“It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression, because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessments suggest such a thing.”

That’s the exact opposite of what most US commanders have suggested, but Gen. Pavel insisted that the deployments in the Baltics were a “political” question and not a military one, and that no further escalation should be considered.

US NATO commander Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges kept talking up the “threat” of Russia in his own comments, however, complaining that the Russian military has an ability to deploy large amounts of troops into Eastern Europe much faster than NATO can, saying he believes NATO needs to get faster

That’s likely a tall order, since Russia is actually in Eastern Europe, and its deployments are on its own soil, which of course is far simpler than the US and Britain scrambling troops to eastern Poland.