The Baltic States Remain on Guard

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In 1873 Alexander Fedorovich Rittikh, one of the Russian Empire’s most eminent cartographers, published two maps of the Baltic provinces depicting the ethnographic and religious composition of the region’s inhabitants.

The Baltic provinces of Estland, Livland and Kurland, which correspond to present day Estonia and Latvia, had been incorporated into the Russian Empire during the 18th century. They continued, however, to be regarded as a distinct region within the empire, characterised by a degree of autonomy in local governance, German speaking elites, Estonian- and Latvian-speaking peasantry, and their majority Lutheran faith.

Estonia and Latvia, along with Lithuania, gained their independence when tsarist Russia fell apart after the First World War, but in 1940 Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin seized them. The Nazis conquered all three in 1941 but Moscow regained them in 1944, and they would remain Soviet republics until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

NATO TERRITORY

The Baltic states, given their cultural and political culture, found it easy to rejoin the west, and today they are members of the European Union and NATO. Now they are also front-line states bordering the Russian Federation, which is at war in Ukraine.

This, understandably, has made these small states very nervous. Last March, Latvian President Egils Levits urged NATO to replace its “tripwire” stance with an approach of “forward defence,” including stationing NATO troops in key locations to be able to beat off, or even counterattack, any infringement of state sovereignty on the Alliance’s eastern flank.

The president of Lithuania, Gitanas Nauseda, suggested that implementing “selective no-fly zones” near very sensitive areas, such as nuclear power plants, could be “credible” yet also “not risk escalation.” Estonian President Alar Karis said that the missiles falling on Ukrainian cities “are falling on every city in Europe and that all of Europe is at war. We are fighting for Ukraine.”

When a missile landed in Poland last November, killing two people across the border with Ukraine, it was at first thought it came from the Russians. The Baltic states were quick to call on the collective defence of NATO. Lithuanian President Nauseda declared on Twitter: “Every inch of NATO territory must be defended!”

Others said the incident made the case for even greater military support for Ukraine. Latvia’s defence minister, Artis Pabriks, suggested NATO could provide more air defences for Poland and “part of the territory of Ukraine.” Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, said the West should give Ukraine more military, humanitarian, and financial support.

RUSSIA'S AMBITIONS

Is this just paranoia? Maybe not. Russian President Vladimir Putin sometimes sounds as if Russia plans further escalation. In a speech made last June, three months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, he appeared to leave the door open for further Russian territorial expansion.

Paying tribute to Russian tsar Peter the Great, the founder of St. Petersburg, Putin drew parallels between the tsar’s actions and modernday Russia’s ambitions. An autocratic modernizer admired by liberal and conservative Russians alike, he ruled for 43 years and gave his name to the new capital that he built on land he conquered from Sweden in the Great Northern War of 1700–1721.

“This,” Putin added, also “applies to Narva,” the Estonian border city largely populated by ethnic Russians, which was captured by Peter in that war.

That same month, a member of Russia’s State Duma submitted a bill to the country’s parliament to repeal the recognition by the USSR of Lithuania’s independence. Yevgeny Fyodorov, a member of Putin’s United Russia party, claimed that the decision by the State Council of the USSR to recognize the independence of the Republic of Lithuania in 1991 was “illegal.”

Fyodorov maintained that a referendum on secession from the USSR was not held in Lithuania before the recognition of its independence and a transitional period was not established to consider all “controversial issues.”

“We have a lot of claims against Lithuania, in particular, with regard to the rights of the Russian-speaking population,” remarked Vladimir Evseev, the head of the Caucasus Department of the Institute of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose successor to the USSR.

“In addition, there is a scenario according to which we will have to enter its territory in order to provide a corridor to Kaliningrad,” the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea separated from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Poland.

In response, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis warned that Lithuania must respond accordingly and be ready to defend itself together with its partners. Such worries keep the leaders of the Baltic nations awake at night.