Suddenly NATO’s Baltic Allies Are the Center of Attention

The Morning Jolt, from Riga, Lativa, back on May 14:

If you compiled a list of the countries that are most likely to get invaded by a hostile force in the next five years, the good news for Latvians is that they wouldn’t be at the top of that list.

But Latvia would still probably make the top ten list of those countries most at risk, alongside its Baltic neighbors Estonia and Lithuania. And a Latvian official who deals with national security issues speculated that perhaps a year or so after the Ukraine war “stops being a hot war,” Russia could regenerate its capabilities sufficiently to at least threaten an invasion of one or more of the Baltic states.

This Latvian official also observed, “Russians can miscalculate,” and even if NATO’s forces were thoroughly prepared to repel a Russian invasion attempt, the decision-makers in Moscow may not realize it or may not want to believe it. After all, Russia initially believed it would complete its annexation of Ukraine within a matter of months. Deterrence doesn’t just require being prepared to fend off a threat; it requires the other guy to know and believe you’re prepared to fend off his threat.

The Wall Street Journal, this morning:

Russia doesn’t pose an imminent threat to Estonia or neighboring countries in NATO with the bulk of its forces bogged down in Ukraine, officials say. But once the war in Ukraine ends, many Western officials expect Moscow to set its sights on the Baltic region as part of Putin’s ambitions to revamp Russia’s role as a global superpower and restore influence over former Soviet states that joined NATO and pivoted West. Putin has repeatedly characterized NATO as a top threat to Russia, though NATO officials dismiss these claims and maintain the alliance is defensive in nature.

With that in mind, officials here say they have a clear strategy: Show Moscow that Estonia and its fellow Baltic neighbors in NATO will never be a convenient target of opportunity. That means routine military drills, diplomatic coordination with NATO, and strengthening civil society against any form of Russian aggression, from military incursions to disinformation campaigns.

In December 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry demanded the “withdrawal of multinational NATO battalions from Poland and from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.” In June 2022, a member of Russia’s State Duma introduced a bill to the country’s parliament to repeal the recognition of Lithuania’s independence.

In 2023, China’s ambassador in Paris said in a television interview: “Even these ex–Soviet Union countries do not have effective status, as we say, under international law because there’s no international accord to concretise their status as a sovereign country.” In the minds of some influential minds in Moscow and Beijing, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are not really independent and sovereign nations, even though they have been independent, free, and recognized under law all around the globe since 1991.

Last year, Carlo Masala wrote the book If Russia Wins: A Scenario, envisioning a near future where Russia has emerged from its invasion of Ukraine relatively victorious — Ukraine pledges to never join NATO and starts to drift into the Russian orbit — and then the Russian military chooses to capture the small Estonian town of Narva and the island of Hiiumaa in the Baltic Sea. In Masala’s scenario, the major NATO powers aren’t willing to risk a war with Russia to liberate a town of 50,000 people right next to the Russian border. NATO’s Article V is proven to be a promise that was never meant to be kept, and a cash-strapped Europe abandons rearmament and comes to accept its status in Russia’s sphere of influence.

Are the Russians itching for a new confrontation with NATO? No, although keep in mind, captured Russian troops have told the Ukrainians their commanders told them that they were already fighting NATO. If you want to deter future wars, you have to be willing to put time, effort, and resources into deterrence.