But if so, then it's just honoring commitments.
"... the idea is eventually to move a heavy brigade combat team with its tanks and Bradley vehicles to an area further east, such as Poland, Romania, or one of the Baltic countries...."
So the forward-positioned troops would be in NATO countries--there's no talk (yet, at least) of stationing US troops in Ukraine, much less in the Donbas. (Personally, I think that's where NATO troops should be placed--5-10 miles from the Ukrainian/Donbas border, well within artillery range but with only defensive weapons. Sort of like the US troops in S. Korea are a trip-wire that let the North know we mean business but also guarantee that we won't whimsically initiate something that'll get 30k US soldiers killed. If you want a deterrence, make it a meaningful one.)
If the troops are only in NATO countries and in smallish numbers then the only way that Russian troops could be involved in a direct confrontation is if the Russian troops find themselves in the Baltic country, Poland, or Romania. Unless NATO attacks Russia. Granted, there could be miscommunication--there's been a lot of that, what with no Russian troops in the Crimea until they turned out to be there all along.
It's too late to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine, popular wisdom has it, because it's already happened. (I find this disingenuous: There's a lot of space there for further aggression.) But it's not too late to deal with stirring up trouble in the Baltics or Romania: Russia wants a lot of Lithuanian soldiers extradited to Russia for refusing to report or obey orders as the USSR broke up. It insists on more rights for Russians and Russian-speakers in the Baltics. It's hinted that the partition of Poland wasn't all that bad a thing. And it's continued to make trouble with Transnistria and Romania. Just as Russia would probably like a land route to the Crimea, it's long wanted a restoration of a land route to the territory it annexed by treaty at the end of WWII, Kaliningrad.
Oddly, those are precisely the countries that the defense.gov article refers to. Those that Russia has an interest in making problems for and those that it's suggested it might.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=123716 (whence the quote near the beginning of my post).
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