Oleg turned and stared out the window as the president was saluted by an honor guard and boarded the helicopter. Oleg berated himself for remaining silent throughout the one-sided discussion. He had not raised any objection nor even asked a question. Yet how was he supposed to respond to such a plan? He was counselor to a man who neither sought nor brooked any counsel other than his own. Surely Petrovsky and Nimkov would see it as madness, he tried to assure himself. If anyone could wave the president off such a scheme, it would be one or both of them.
Oleg badly needed a cigarette, but clearly there wasn’t going to be time for that. The whine of the rotors pierced the vast rooms of the mansion, and Oleg knew he needed to get moving. The clearest sign that this plan was not a whim but something Luganov was actively weighing was the fact that he was heading back to the Kremlin to meet with his war cabinet. These days his father-in-law seemed increasingly annoyed by any time he had to spend with his cabinet or senior staff. In recent months he had routinely canceled meetings and asked for senior officials to route written questions through his chief of staff or through Oleg himself. Oleg often found himself drafting replies to this never-ending flood of queries on every manner of subject. Professionally, this made Oleg a more valuable advisor than ever. He had more access to the president than almost any other human being. Strategically, however, he was worried. The president was slowly yet steadily narrowing his inner circle. He was getting input from fewer and fewer people. The minister of defense, army chief of staff, and the head of the FSB still had a great deal of access and were summoned—or at least telephoned—more than most. Those officials who handled such mundane matters as the budget or infrastructure or education got almost no time from the president at all.
As Luganov increasingly withdrew from the petty nuisance of meeting with subordinates, he spent less and less time in his office. Occasionally it was unavoidable, such as when various world leaders came to see him. Then the police would block off highways and side streets so his motorcade could whisk him to the Kremlin. Other times, like today, he would chopper in, an arrangement that allowed him to spend more and more time working out of Novo-Ogaryovo, his immense palace west of the city, valued at over $200 million.
Often his mistress stayed there as well. This made it exceedingly awkward when Luganov insisted that Oleg sleep there so they could work late. Katya Slatsky was at least thirty-five years the president’s junior. The girl was stunningly beautiful, to be sure. But she was young enough to be the man’s daughter. Indeed, she was actually younger than Marina, who hated the whore who had replaced her mother with an intensity that only Oleg saw. Marina had never expressed or even hinted at such feelings to her father. Whether this was out of love or fear, Oleg could not say. Fortunately, Katya had not been there last night, and Luganov had been all business.
The fact that the president was not only willing but eager to go back to the Kremlin meant this war plan—as dangerous as it was—had become a top priority. So Oleg forced himself to his feet and headed to the chopper, and soon they were off the ground and banking eastward for the capital.
When they landed inside the walls of the Kremlin, they headed straight for the conference room adjacent to Luganov’s office. The war cabinet was already assembled and waiting. They all stood when the president entered the room and sat only when he took his seat at the head of the table. In the past, Oleg had sat in a chair behind the president and to the left of the chief of staff. But ever since his promotion to chief counselor, he sat at the main table with the principals, at the end directly opposite his father-in-law.
“Gentlemen, the time has come to restore the true glory of Mother Russia,” Luganov began. “This means bringing ethnic Russians outside our fold back under our care, retaking lands that are rightfully ours, humiliating the West, and proving that the U.S. and NATO are paper tigers and that Russia is the sole and dominant power on the earth.”
47
Luganov had their attention now.
Everyone grunted approval. Yet as Luganov explained his plan, Oleg saw many of the expressions change ever so discreetly.
What the president was proposing was a full invasion and occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, followed by formal annexation of each. Immediately afterward, snap elections would be held whereby the populations of the Baltic states would vote to rejoin the Russian Federation—voluntarily, Luganov insisted—so they could “enjoy all the rights and privileges of being full Russian citizens.”
Luganov said he wanted to launch his blitzkrieg using twenty-seven battalions—roughly twenty-one thousand soldiers—to seize Estonia and Latvia. Based on his calculations, he believed they could reach and capture the capitals of Tallinn and Riga in just sixty hours. He said another fifteen battalions—nearly twelve thousand troops—would be needed to wrest control of Lithuania. He proposed attacking through Belarus and from the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, west of Lithuania and north of Poland. He believed they’d need another two days to capture and adequately control the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.
At this point the president opened a leather binder and handed out copies of a ten-page war plan he had drafted himself. He walked his team through the document. The first few pages laid out specific tactical objectives such as roads, power plants, and cities that needed to be taken, by which battalions, and by what specific dates and times. It also laid out a time frame that nearly made Oleg’s jaw drop. The president wanted to launch the attack no later than the end of October. That was just four months away.
The next few pages included maps and suggested routes of attack. The last two pages raised specific questions to which the president said he expected detailed answers by their next meeting, set for the following day. Luganov wanted to know from his foreign minister whether he believed the president of Belarus would agree to a snap joint military exercise inside his territory and what kind of sweeteners might be needed to get Minsk on board. He wanted to know how quickly the defense minister could put together exercises for a hundred thousand or more troops on the border of Ukraine in order to divert attention and make it seem like he might actually go for a full invasion not of the Baltics but rather Ukraine in the hopes of seizing Kiev, which he had recently and very publicly called “the mother of all Russian cities.”
From the chief of the air force he wanted to know how many squadrons of bombers and fighter jets he could safely move from the Eastern Military District near China to the Western MD without creating a significant vulnerability on the eastern front, how quickly this could be accomplished, and whether it could be done discreetly enough not to immediately draw the attention of the Pentagon. From his FSB chief he wanted to know what kind of progress had been made in surreptitiously providing automatic weapons, ammunition, and explosives to Russian loyalists in each of the Baltic republics and whether they had the proper communications equipment to be mobilized when the time was right.