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“The possible threats are growing in Central Asia as NATO winds down in Afghanistan.” The BBC quotes Felgenhauer. “So there will be a possible expansion of Russia’s military presence in Central Asia – Russian officers with local soldiers. But that does not mean mass recruitment of foreigners.” He then noted to the BBC that thousands of Tajiks had served under Russian officers during unrest in Tajikistan in the 1990s.

Right. Of course that makes it all OK. Golts and Felgenhauer are both solid citizens in the international defence analyst community and have never hesitated to criticize Russian defence policy, but politically this seems a little disingenuous in light of Putin’s actions in Crimea, Ukraine, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Georgia, not to mention a highly provocative stance in the Baltic region. By analogy, it would be just fine if the U.S. Army were authorized (by Washington) to employ a few Canadian citizens in Canada as contract troops under command of American officers just in case of a threat from somewhere, and a few more in Mexico just in case of a threat from the drug cartels.

No mention of host government approval throughout, not that that might be unimaginably hard to come by given that every post-Soviet government outside the Baltics is penetrated by Russian influence to a greater or less degree (this continues to be a big problem for Poroshenko’s Ukrainian government) – but Russia never asks permission in its own backyard anyway. No mention of Russian “volunteers on vacation” in East Ukraine, where fighting has heated up to the point where German Chancellor Angela Merkel backed out of a summit scheduled for January 15 in Astana, Kazakhstan that was to have discussed a cease-fire agreed to at Minsk last September, on the grounds that there is no ceasefire. This past weekend has seen intense fighting around Donetsk.