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“It is important to show Russia that Latvia has allies,” said businessman Aldis Thomson, who stopped while driving around the perimeter of the Aduzu base earlier this week. “It is the right action from NATO to show the world that it is ready to act against Russian confrontation.”

Asked if the Canadians would be welcomed by his countrymen, Tomsons replied, “Yes, I am sure. Absolutely sure.”

Moscow has not been nearly so welcoming of NATO’s plan to deploy 4,000 Canadian, British, German and American combat forces to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. Its foreign ministry has warned that the move “requires certain retaliatory measures which the Russian Defence Ministry is already talking about.”

The first of those counter-actions was revealed Tuesday, when Russia’s Interfax news agency said the Kremlin intended to place a powerful new Sunflower radar network at its bases abutting the Baltic states and Poland. The highly sensitive radars can reach out more than 300 kilometres to track aircraft and ships and can direct missiles to their targets.

A similar system will also likely be deployed against NATO on the Black Sea, the agency said.

Such tit-for-tat behaviour is an eerie echo of the military brinksmanship of the Cold War.

After several decades of almost total calm on the eastern front, NATO’s decision to up the ante by maintaining a persistent western military presence near the Russian frontier arises from Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine two years ago, the bloody civil war that his troops and agents have fomented in eastern Ukraine since then, and plans announced recently by Moscow to urgently field three army divisions comprising at least 30,000 troops in the west of the country.