Green caps are back. There will be border troops
“Still, I had naive ideas that the whole world, and above all the so-called civilized one, understands what happened to Russia, that it has completely become a different country, that there is no longer ideological confrontation, which means there is no basis for confrontation .
If something negative happens in the policies of Western countries towards Russia - in particular, support for separatism and terrorism on Russian territory was obvious, I, as director of the FSB, saw this.
But I naively believed that this was simply the inertia of thinking and action. They got used to fighting the Soviet Union and continue to do so.”
If something negative happens in the policies of Western countries towards Russia - in particular, support for separatism and terrorism on Russian territory was obvious, I, as director of the FSB, saw this.
But I naively believed that this was simply the inertia of thinking and action. They got used to fighting the Soviet Union and continue to do so.”
Some readers will likely recognize this quote. These are the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which he said quite recently on “Direct Line”. Honestly, when I heard these words, I respected our president even more. I know very well how difficult it is to admit your mistakes. And recognizing them publicly, in fact in front of the whole people, is doubly difficult.
And I took these words not as sprinkling ashes on my own head, but as a willingness to correct these mistakes. Fix it quickly, taking into account the development of the situation around our country. And here is the law! A law signed by President Putin, which many, especially young people, did not pay attention to.
Meanwhile, these are very serious changes in the issue of protecting the state border of the Russian Federation. The law actually destroys the existing security system and actually changes the police security system to a military one. Let me remind you that in the USSR there were border troops as part of the KGB. The very term “border troops” disappeared from state documents already in the new Russia, in 2005.
One of the authors of the PV reform, “border guard Serdyukov,” Lieutenant General of the Border Troops Nikolai Rybalkin, Doctor of Philosophy, Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Informatization, described the future of the border guards so beautifully that our leaders were not even interested in the opinion of the border guards themselves. According to Rybalkin, it turned out that the main thing is taking care of the border guards, and not protecting the border...
Trust, but... protect
I remember how enthusiastically Russians reacted to the opening of borders. No, not the disappearance of border guards, but the opening of borders. Alas, we did not immediately understand what this threatened us with. We fell for beautiful packaging, foreign labels, and incomprehensible names. Moreover, all this could only be sent by friends. The whole world is our friends! How similar this is to what is happening today in some former republics of the USSR, even now.
Few people then understood that with the disappearance of the border troops, we practically opened the way for not only criminals from neighboring states to penetrate us, but also spies of various stripes. Or they understood, but they also understood something else: our “bearers of state secrets” are already leaking information to the West for little money.
Remember General Kalugin?
This would continue to happen. But the events in Ukraine, not even the North Military District, but all these “Muscovites against Gilyaks,” “Muscovites against knives,” and so on, opened the eyes of many. Dark personalities began to scurry back and forth across the “sort of border” weapon and ammunition flowed towards us. Border checkpoints simply could not physically block this flow of smuggling.
But everything changed with the beginning of the SVO.
I then wrote about why PR forays into our territory became possible, why enemy DRGs calmly penetrate us and terrorize the population of border areas. All these “electronic border guards” will not be able to effectively guard the border on their own. These are just border guard assistants.
I don’t think it’s worth reminding us of how we “stopped” attacks by enemy DRGs? Remember the hero “the man with the Saiga”? It was these “men”, police officers who were simply not trained to fight saboteurs, and were not armed for such tasks, who stopped these thugs. And who “pushed” them abroad? Have you even read the word “border guard”? Army men!
It turned out to be just an idiotic picture. There are no border guards who know their section of the border almost to the last blade of grass. It's expensive and unnecessary. But soldiers, including conscripts, who are not trained to perform these tasks and who do not know the terrain - this is normal. They even decided to recognize these soldiers as members of the Northern Military District.
Moreover, some regional leaders took a necessary measure, creating a people's militia to repel possible attacks by saboteurs. Agree, armed workers and peasants are incomparable with border guards. But Moscow was silent. The governors had to react. It looked quite comical. Although everyone understood that it was necessary to react. But exposing civilians to bullets...
It is clear that the Kremlin had to make a rather difficult decision. Recreating border outposts and the entire system of border protection by border troops is a costly matter. But necessary. At a time when the situation in the Northern Military District zone was extremely tense, when the expectation of a quick stop to hostilities and a cessation of terrorist attacks on the Donbass did not materialize, to go to such expense... It was necessary, first of all, to provide the fighting army with everything necessary.
And then it happened. We have the opportunity to restore the border troops. Not an understanding of their necessity, but an opportunity. The law and the possibilities of conscription service in the state security agencies are precisely the signal that in the spring we will be able to see guys in green caps, and in a couple of years, on May 28, we will again be able to see the flag of the border troops in our parks. As it was in the USSR.
Instead of a conclusion
Border troops are a barrier for the enemy, both in peacetime and in wartime, which ensures our security within the country. Have you ever wondered why, of all the branches and types of troops, only border guards, sailors and paratroopers continue to be proud of their involvement in these troops even in old age? Why do they appear in vests or green caps in our parks every year?
The answer is simple. The landing party either wins or dies. The crew either wins or dies. The outpost either wins or dies. These are not high words. This is simply a condition of service in such troops. By the way, the “musicians” used this idea of “one family” in the same way. Akhmat units too. And other brigades in the Northern Military District zone.
The military method of border protection is the only possible way to do this. The only effective one. In the USSR, the border troops numbered 220 thousand people in the period before the collapse of the Union. Today, Russia's border is smaller than that of the Soviet Union. This is approximately 61 km. But we have SVO. This means that the number of PV of the FSB of the Russian Federation should be approximately the same.
That is, if we recall the data from the past conscription of conscripts, taking into account contract border guards, for the complete restoration of the PV it is necessary to recruit something like 120-150 thousand conscripts. And this is comparable to the conscription of almost all young soldiers in the conscription campaign. Suffice it to name the numbers: in the spring of 2023, 147 thousand people were called up.
So I won’t talk about the quick recovery of PV. The process is long. Not one year. But the main thing is that this process has begun. We will restore. First, where it is most difficult, and then everywhere...
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