Obama’s Europe trip warning to Putin

The White House says President Barack Obama’s next week trip to Europe is a warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin against “messing around” with the Baltic States.

President Obama will travel to Tallinn on Tuesday to meet with the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The visit comes amid escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine.

“Part of the message that the president will be sending is, we stand with you,” Charles Kupchan, the administration’s senior director for European Affairs, said on Friday.

“Article Five constitutes an ironclad guarantee of your security. Russia, don’t even think about messing around in Estonia or in any of the Baltic areas in the same way that you have been messing around in Ukraine,” he added.

He was referring to NATO’s Article Five that obligates all members of the alliance to come to the defense of any member country which that is targeted.

“In this new world that we live in, NATO or individual countries may be facing not armored columns coming across their border, which you can usually see in advance, but guys coming across in masks — you don’t know who they are, what we could call hybrid warfare or asymmetric warfare, and that requires a very different kind of military response than NATO has traditionally been focused on,” Kupchan said.

On Thursday, Obama threatened his Russian counterpart with new sanctions over Ukraine.

“Russia is responsible for the violence in eastern Ukraine,” Obama said. “The new images of Russian forces inside Ukraine make that plain for the world to see.”

Moscow’s actions “will only bring more cost and consequences to Russia,” Obama told reporters.

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