With NATO actively building up its airforce support in Poland and the Baltic states in recent days in a flashback to cold war military escalation and deterrence, and even launching AWACS planes [6]over Poland and Romania to monitor the Ukraine crisis and "enhance the alliance's situational awareness," the inevitable has finally happened, and other Russian neighbor states, ones not alligned with the military treaty, have escalated in turn only this time the are showing their allegiance not to the west but to Russia.
Moments ago RIA reported that Minsk will "adequately react to the strengthening of NATO forces near the borders of Belarus, and will offer to host up to an additional 15 Russian aircraft, according to the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday at a meeting of the Security Council of Belarus.
"Belarus is adequately reacting to the strengthen the forces of NATO near the borders of Belarus" - the president said. He added that "Belarus will offer to host up to an additional 15 Russian Federation aircraft in connection with the activity of NATO."
Which, it goes without saying, plays precisely into Putin's intentions all along: force all of Russia's neighbors to reveal their allegiance, and since virtually all would have to pick Moscow (see what happened in Ukraine), set the stage for the grand reincarnation of the Soviet Union.
In the meantime, while the G-7 and everyone with a microphone, continues to warn Russia not to annex Crimea, which now seems a done deal, Ukraine's PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whose cash-strapped nation needs as much as $15 billion in loans, will meet President Barack Obama later today. And as if to aid Putin's plans even further, First Deputy Premier Vitaliy Yarema told the government in Kiev that Russian forces continue to be deployed along Ukraine’s eastern border and are “constantly increasing their presence,”
Logically, the western response will be to beef up NATO forces even more, which in turn will force nations like Belarus to self-annex themselves to Russia by demanding even more Russian troops in their nations, allowing Putin to serially, and peacefully, to takeover the former USSR nations one by one until the empire rebuilding effort is complete.