Russia beefs up Baltic Fleet with missiles

Russia is reinforcing its Baltic Fleet in Kaliningrad with two small warships armed with long-range cruise missiles to counter what it sees as a worrying Nato build-up in the region, Russia's daily Izvestia reported yesterday.

There was no official confirmation from Moscow, but the report will raise tensions in the Baltic already heightened since Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and is likely to cause particular consternation in Poland and Lithuania which share land borders with Kaliningrad.

The reported deployment comes at a time when Nato is planning its biggest military build-up on Russia's borders since the Cold War to counter Moscow and Russian military analysts said the move looked like a direct response to Nato.

Norway announced Monday that 330 US Marines, to be stationed on rotation around 1,000 kilometres from the Russian border, will be engaged in training and manoeuvres from January 2017. Russia strongly condemned the move.

Izvestia cited an unnamed military source as saying that the two ships, the Serpukhov and the Zeleny Dol, had already entered the Baltic Sea and would soon become part of a newly formed division.

The Buyan-class corvettes are armed with nuclear-capable Kalibr cruise missiles, which the Russian military says have a range of at least 1,500 kilometres.

It said the Baltic Fleet's coastal defences would also be beefed up with the Bastion and Bal land-based missile systems. The Bastion is a mobile defence system armed with two anti-ship missiles with a range of up to 300 km . The Bal anti-ship missile has a similar range.

Earlier this month, Russia moved nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles into Kaliningrad leading to protests from Lithuania and Poland.