The hectic events of the last few hours in Russia are observed from the Baltic with a mixture of concern and schadenfreude, or joy at the misfortune of others. Although they do not currently see an immediate threat against their countries, the governments of Poland and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well as Finland and Sweden, which, unlike its neighbours, remains in the waiting for NATO, they closely monitor the situation in collaboration with their partners in the military organization and yesterday took measures to strengthen the eastern border.
“The Kremlin reaps what it sows. All the violence directed against Ukraine has been turned against it,” tweeted Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, who expressed his wish that the summit of the Atlantic Alliance to be held in Vilnius in July “assess the new circumstances” and value taking “additional measures” to “be prepared for any scenario”. “For a hundred years, Lithuanians have lived on the border of the brutal Moscow bandit regime, knowing that the next implosion is only a matter of time. We are not distracted, we see the chaos clearly. The goal, as always, is the victory of Ukraine”, added the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gabrielius Landsbergis.
“Estonia is closely following the development of events in Russia and exchanging information with its allies,” tweeted Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who assured citizens that “there is no direct threat against the country” and prayed that they do not travel to “any region” in the neighboring country. The prime ministers of the three Baltic republics and Finland spoke by phone yesterday and are in contact to coordinate and exchange information, he added.
“We are ready to adopt additional measures, if necessary, to protect our borders”, pointed out the Latvian Prime Minister, Krisjanis Karins. “The more the second strongest army in the world is weakened by the counter-offensive that has arisen among its ranks, the less work Ukraine will have to do”, commented with irony the Lithuanian Prime Minister, Ingrida Simonyte. “Watching spiders stuck in a jar is always an unpleasant sight, but the end result is always the same, a certain amount of poison, no matter how it ends,” he said of the test of strength that the leader of the mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin has launched the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Estonia and Latvia have a land border with Russia, while Lithuania has it through the Kaliningrad enclave, where the Russian Baltic Sea fleet has been based since 2016. Finland, on the other hand, has the widest land border of all NATO members, more than 1,300 kilometers. Russia is not the only neighbor they have to worry about. Both Lithuania and Latvia share a border with Moscow’s closest ally, Belarus. Its president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, allowed Putin to use the country’s territory to launch an attack on Ukraine through the Chernihiv region and recently authorized the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear missiles.
Since the start of the war, NATO has practically multiplied tenfold the number of soldiers on its eastern flank, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. If before the invasion there were 4,650 troops, in April there were around 40,000, an increase channeled through the four allied battalions created in the Baltic republics and Poland following the Russian annexation of Crimea.
At the Madrid summit a year ago, when allied leaders agreed to the biggest boost to collective security since the end of the Cold War, it was decided to create four more in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia , as well as raising the number of its rapid reaction force to 300,000 soldiers.
