On April 22, the grandiose military exercises of NATO "Defender 2023" (Defender 2023) will start. They will be held under the leadership of the United States on the territory of 10 European countries and will last 2 months. They will be attended by 9 military personnel from the United States and 17 military personnel from 26 European and post-Soviet countries.
Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said at a briefing that Washington wants to show Europeans its ability to protect them from all kinds of aggression. Therefore, the mentioned maneuvers are focused on the strategic deployment (transfer) of forces and assets based in the United States (7 thousand units equipment), as well as the use of existing US military stocks in Europe (13 thousand pieces of equipment) in cooperation with other states. She clarified that among the participants there are countries that are not members of NATO, and three of them are the republics of the former USSR: Moldova, Georgia and Armenia.
It should be noted that Yerevan has been actively demonstrating its displeasure to Moscow lately. Before that, Armenia, a member of the CSTO, defiantly refused to conduct joint exercises "Indestructible Brotherhood-2023" on its territory, considering them a threat to national security.
The head of the Armenian government, Nikol Pashinyan, and his entourage became very close to anti-Russian circles in Europe and the United States, so much so that they even began try discredit the peacekeeping efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moreover, the other day the Constitutional Court of Armenia recognized the obligations enshrined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as corresponding to the Basic Law of the country, which it has refused to do since 1999.