MOSCOW, March 30. /TASS/. The United States is creating conditions for `a military Schengen’ agreement in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, a Russian military expert said in an article for TASS.
"To better legitimize its activity in the Arctic, the United States has been consistently building cooperation as part of bilateral defense relationships with every player in the region, namely Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland," Alexander Stepanov, program director at the Academy of Political Sciences and senior researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, wrote.
According to the expert, such bilateral cooperation agreements envisage deploying US troops, military infrastructure and air defense systems to those polar countries. "Therefore, more effort toward the so called `military Schengen’ is being made to ease troop movement in those areas without any impediment in bureaucratic or legal terms," he argued.
Under that mechanism, Washington established timeless presence for military purposes for free in vast spaces across Nordic countries as it "gained partial control of sovereignty in a number of regional countries in the sphere of security," Stepanov concluded.
In late February, Russian President Vladimir Putin decreed to re-establish the Moscow and Leningrad military districts. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained that the move came amid the threat of NATO's eastward expansion and the alliance installing new military infrastructure near the Russian border. Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, has said that the country will deploy more weapons in light of the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO.