Zelensky says 'Ayatollah Putin' wants to wage war

Russia attacking key eastern city: Ukraine commander

The Advertiser

an hour ago

The Advertiser

Russia attacking key eastern city: Ukraine commander

Ukraine's top commander says his forces are facing a new onslaught against a key city on the eastern front of its war against Russia while the Kremlin says its military is making progress in another sector farther southwest. After their initial failed advance on the capital Kyiv in the first weeks after the February 2022 invasion, Russian troops have focused on capturing all of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The city of Kostiantynivka has been a major target. Ukrainian forces have for months defended the city against fierce assaults, with the regional governor urging remaining residents this week to leave as infrastructure breaks down. Top Ukrainian commander Oleksander Syrskyi, writing on Telegram on Saturday, said the area around Kostiantynivka was gripped by heavy fighting. "The enemy is surging towards Kostiantynivka but apart from sustaining numerous losses, has achieved nothing," Syrskyi said. "The aggressor is trying to break through our defences and advance along three operating sectors." A spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, Viktor Trehubov, told the Ukrinform news agency that Kostiantynivka and the city of Pokrovsk to the west were "the main arena of battles and the Kremlin's strategic ambitions". Syrskyi also said that Ukrainian forces had withstood in the past week a powerful attack near the village of Yablunivka in northeastern Sumy region, where Russian forces have been trying to establish a buffer zone inside the Ukrainian border. Russia's Defence Ministry, in a report earlier in the day, said its forces had seized the village of Chervona Zirka - further southwest, near the administrative border of Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia's slow advance through eastern Ukraine, claiming a string of villages day after day, has resulted in destruction of major cities and infrastructure. Russian authorities have insisted that progress towards a settlement of the 40-month-old war depends on Ukraine recognising Russia's control over four Ukrainian regions - Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russian forces control about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory although they do not fully hold any of the four regions. Russia has said in recent weeks that its troops have made advances in areas adjacent to Dnipropetrovsk region, which lies next to both Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukrainian officials have denied those reports. Ukraine's top commander says his forces are facing a new onslaught against a key city on the eastern front of its war against Russia while the Kremlin says its military is making progress in another sector farther southwest. After their initial failed advance on the capital Kyiv in the first weeks after the February 2022 invasion, Russian troops have focused on capturing all of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The city of Kostiantynivka has been a major target. Ukrainian forces have for months defended the city against fierce assaults, with the regional governor urging remaining residents this week to leave as infrastructure breaks down. Top Ukrainian commander Oleksander Syrskyi, writing on Telegram on Saturday, said the area around Kostiantynivka was gripped by heavy fighting. "The enemy is surging towards Kostiantynivka but apart from sustaining numerous losses, has achieved nothing," Syrskyi said. "The aggressor is trying to break through our defences and advance along three operating sectors." A spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, Viktor Trehubov, told the Ukrinform news agency that Kostiantynivka and the city of Pokrovsk to the west were "the main arena of battles and the Kremlin's strategic ambitions". Syrskyi also said that Ukrainian forces had withstood in the past week a powerful attack near the village of Yablunivka in northeastern Sumy region, where Russian forces have been trying to establish a buffer zone inside the Ukrainian border. Russia's Defence Ministry, in a report earlier in the day, said its forces had seized the village of Chervona Zirka - further southwest, near the administrative border of Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia's slow advance through eastern Ukraine, claiming a string of villages day after day, has resulted in destruction of major cities and infrastructure. Russian authorities have insisted that progress towards a settlement of the 40-month-old war depends on Ukraine recognising Russia's control over four Ukrainian regions - Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russian forces control about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory although they do not fully hold any of the four regions. Russia has said in recent weeks that its troops have made advances in areas adjacent to Dnipropetrovsk region, which lies next to both Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukrainian officials have denied those reports. Ukraine's top commander says his forces are facing a new onslaught against a key city on the eastern front of its war against Russia while the Kremlin says its military is making progress in another sector farther southwest. After their initial failed advance on the capital Kyiv in the first weeks after the February 2022 invasion, Russian troops have focused on capturing all of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The city of Kostiantynivka has been a major target. Ukrainian forces have for months defended the city against fierce assaults, with the regional governor urging remaining residents this week to leave as infrastructure breaks down. Top Ukrainian commander Oleksander Syrskyi, writing on Telegram on Saturday, said the area around Kostiantynivka was gripped by heavy fighting. "The enemy is surging towards Kostiantynivka but apart from sustaining numerous losses, has achieved nothing," Syrskyi said. "The aggressor is trying to break through our defences and advance along three operating sectors." A spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, Viktor Trehubov, told the Ukrinform news agency that Kostiantynivka and the city of Pokrovsk to the west were "the main arena of battles and the Kremlin's strategic ambitions". Syrskyi also said that Ukrainian forces had withstood in the past week a powerful attack near the village of Yablunivka in northeastern Sumy region, where Russian forces have been trying to establish a buffer zone inside the Ukrainian border. Russia's Defence Ministry, in a report earlier in the day, said its forces had seized the village of Chervona Zirka - further southwest, near the administrative border of Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia's slow advance through eastern Ukraine, claiming a string of villages day after day, has resulted in destruction of major cities and infrastructure. Russian authorities have insisted that progress towards a settlement of the 40-month-old war depends on Ukraine recognising Russia's control over four Ukrainian regions - Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russian forces control about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory although they do not fully hold any of the four regions. Russia has said in recent weeks that its troops have made advances in areas adjacent to Dnipropetrovsk region, which lies next to both Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukrainian officials have denied those reports. Ukraine's top commander says his forces are facing a new onslaught against a key city on the eastern front of its war against Russia while the Kremlin says its military is making progress in another sector farther southwest. After their initial failed advance on the capital Kyiv in the first weeks after the February 2022 invasion, Russian troops have focused on capturing all of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The city of Kostiantynivka has been a major target. Ukrainian forces have for months defended the city against fierce assaults, with the regional governor urging remaining residents this week to leave as infrastructure breaks down. Top Ukrainian commander Oleksander Syrskyi, writing on Telegram on Saturday, said the area around Kostiantynivka was gripped by heavy fighting. "The enemy is surging towards Kostiantynivka but apart from sustaining numerous losses, has achieved nothing," Syrskyi said. "The aggressor is trying to break through our defences and advance along three operating sectors." A spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, Viktor Trehubov, told the Ukrinform news agency that Kostiantynivka and the city of Pokrovsk to the west were "the main arena of battles and the Kremlin's strategic ambitions". Syrskyi also said that Ukrainian forces had withstood in the past week a powerful attack near the village of Yablunivka in northeastern Sumy region, where Russian forces have been trying to establish a buffer zone inside the Ukrainian border. Russia's Defence Ministry, in a report earlier in the day, said its forces had seized the village of Chervona Zirka - further southwest, near the administrative border of Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia's slow advance through eastern Ukraine, claiming a string of villages day after day, has resulted in destruction of major cities and infrastructure. Russian authorities have insisted that progress towards a settlement of the 40-month-old war depends on Ukraine recognising Russia's control over four Ukrainian regions - Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russian forces control about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory although they do not fully hold any of the four regions. Russia has said in recent weeks that its troops have made advances in areas adjacent to Dnipropetrovsk region, which lies next to both Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukrainian officials have denied those reports.

‘A question of when': Why Russia's next move could be on the Baltics

The Age

9 hours ago

The Age

‘A question of when': Why Russia's next move could be on the Baltics

What and where, exactly, are the Baltic states? Those who live there have heard this so often they've learned to hide their eye-rolls and offer up some ready-made responses instead. Hence, Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a picturesque cobblestoned city on the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe, is sometimes described as a chilly version of (Italy's) Milan or a southern alternative to (Finland's) Helsinki. Nearby Lithuania's enterprising tourist board made a tote bag that said, 'I only date people who know where [the capital] Vilnius is' and dreamed up a famously risque campaign showing a woman tangled up in bedsheets with the slogan: 'Vilnius. The G-spot of Europe. Nobody knows where it is, but when you find it – it's amazing.' Nearby Latvia, meanwhile, has tried the somewhat tamer ad line ' Neighbours tend to surprise ' to raise awareness of the medieval architecture of its ancient capital, Riga, and its food culture (try sparkling birch sap or the pelēkie zirņi ar speķi, a traditional stew of peas and bacon). Nobody who studies geopolitics, however, is in any doubt about the regional importance of the Baltics. The three little nations, wedged between Russia and the Nordic countries, would likely be first in line should Vladimir Putin send his armies westward into Europe. Memories run deep here: many in these states, which were occupied by the Soviet Union for half a century from 1940, have not-so-distant recollections of harsh totalitarian rule. The war in Ukraine has revived these fears: are they next on Vladimir Putin's to-do list? Complicating the picture is the Baltic states', and their neighbours', memberships of NATO , the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – which met in The Hague for its annual summit on June 24 – and its critical Article 5, which considers an attack on an individual member nation an attack on them all. Unlike Russia's 2022 attack on Ukraine (which is not in NATO so did not automatically trigger a response), if Putin's tanks roll over the 'Friendship Bridge' into the Estonian border town of Narva, a wider conflict could rapidly develop. 'This will not be a walk in the park,' Artis Pabriks, former Latvian Minister for Defence, tells us from Riga. But how likely is Russian aggression in the Baltics? What efforts are the Baltic states making to prepare for it? And what is the 'choke point' known as the Suwalki Gap? What's been going on in the Baltic Sea? It has quite a bottleneck, the Baltic Sea. A major shipping route in northern Europe – stretching from the Russian port of St Petersburg in the east to Denmark's Copenhagen in the west – it is completely enclosed, like a vast lake, to its north, south and east, fed by rivers pouring off glaciers in Sweden and Finland. It's shallow and brackish in parts and full of fishing vessels, commercial cargo, ferries, warships, submarines, wind farms and all manner of underground cables and pipelines. Where it meets the Atlantic, in the west, ships must navigate an archipelago of some 400 islands, a handful of which are big enough to warrant joining up with bridges or ferries, others so tiny they are classified as skerries, derived from the Old Norse word for 'rock in the sea'. Many vessels pass through here at a pinch point called The Sound, or Oresund, an occasionally shallow passage that's just four kilometres across at one point and that can ice over in winter. To the east, meanwhile, the sea broadens and forks into a Y, one leg stretching towards the Baltic states and St Petersburg, the other separating Finland and Sweden. 'The most obvious thing the countries share is the sea itself,' writes Oliver Moody in his recently published overview of the region, Baltic: The Future of Europe. 'They have had to learn to collectively steward a heavily polluted and ecologically fragile body of water, laced with daisy chains of gas pipelines, electricity and data cables, and above all the shipping routes on which most of their imports and exports depend. Most glaringly, they have been thrust together by Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine.' Here and there, up pops an island of particular strategic importance. Sweden's Gotland, the largest, sits slap-bang between Scandinavia and Latvia and is directly in the path of Russian traffic departing St Petersburg for the Atlantic. It's been called 'Sweden's unsinkable aircraft carrier': in a time of crisis, it could host thousands of troops (as it did during the Cold War) and fighter jets that could strike passing vessels. Since 2022, Gotland has endured a series of odd events, including a mysterious pump failure that could have left its inhabitants without drinking water and a severed internet cable, prompting Sweden to deploy warships to monitor the Baltic for 'potential sabotage'. The attacks were widely suspected to be Russian dirty tricks, part of a shadow war of cyber warfare, propaganda hacks, cables damaged by ships 'accidentally' dragging their anchors, GPS jamming that affects commercial flights, even attempts to sabotage cargo aircraft with incendiary devices disguised as parcels. 'They are fragmenting the West, trying simply to penetrate us and to make us weaker,' says Artis Pabriks, now chairman of Latvia's Military Technology, Drones and Robotics Association. Few attacks, if any, have been directly linked to, or claimed by, Russia; yet all have been apparently designed to destabilise and unsettle, observers believe. The incidents have been largely concentrated on NATO's eastern flank, where Estonia, Finland, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland brush up against Russia, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. 'It's a hybrid war,' said General Veiko-Vello Palm, Deputy Commander of the Estonian Defence Forces, in 2023. 'The most serious threat is cyber-related, our communications and IT systems are under constant attack.' In April, NATO's top commander, US general Christopher Cavoli, said Russia intended to triple the size of its military after the war in Ukraine ends and would build up its military presence on its borders with Finland and the Baltic states. First in the firing line could be Lithuania, former CIA director general David Petraeus told a webinar run by UK think tank Policy Exchange in late May. 'Lithuania has featured prominently in [Putin's] speeches – and we should be listening.' In December, Finland impounded an oil tanker while it investigated the suspected sabotage of undersea cables at Russia's behest. 'We've witnessed unattributed incidents against critical infrastructure, but we don't really know who the perpetrator is,' Matti Pesu tells us from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, where he is a senior research fellow. 'The incidents may have been accidents, but they've been so frequent that it's unlikely that all of them would be.' Finland's president, Alexander Stubb, last year told a gathering of security experts in Helsinki to expect a rise in information war, sabotage, cyber attacks and attacks on civilian infrastructure. Finland is no stranger to Russian belligerence. It was forced to cede a tenth of its territory to its neighbour after the brutal Winter War of November 1939, when Russia opportunistically invaded while the rest of the world was distracted by events elsewhere. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Finland has closed its 1340-kilometre border with Russia, cut trade ties and now has enough underground bomb shelters to house 4.8 million of its 5.6 million people. Some are big enough to house heated swimming pools, skate parks and soccer pitches, for use in normal times, with spartan bunk rooms ready to accommodate families should the worst happen. Norway also shares a border with Russia, way up in the Arctic, just 195 kilometres long and with a single formal crossing. Between the Norwegian town of Storskog and Borisoglebsky in Russia, it's not more than a few hours' drive to Severomorsk, Russia's primary base for its fleet of nuclear submarines. Norway closed its side of the border to most traffic in May last year, though there are some exceptions, such as Russians allowed to cross to visit family members. How worried are people in the Baltic nations? Until recently, Narva, a town with an ancient fortress by the River Narva on Estonia's eastern border, was a thoroughfare for Russian trade and tourism. Ninety-five per cent of its residents are native Russian speakers, many descended from people who relocated here (voluntarily or otherwise) from the USSR after it annexed Estonia in 1940. Today, they look across the Friendship Bridge that joins the two nations and wonder when tanks might roll across it. All eyes are on Narva, wine importer Giuseppe Bassi tells us from Limoncello, the wine bar he runs in the old part of Estonia's capital, Tallinn. Were a 'provocation' to happen, he says, fears are it would go down in Narva, which he calls 'the most Russian city in Estonia'. Lithuanians, too, have long memories of Russian brutality, says Daiva Sveikackaitė, an artist and commentator in the capital, Vilnius. 'The older generation remembers the USSR very well,' she tells us. 'The planned economy seemed to provide planned security. But that censorship of real history, the lack of freedom of speech, the fear in the memory of the elders about the deportations after World War II … the Lithuanian people did not forget their roots and former independence.' The Baltics each declared their independence from Russia in 1918, after its defeat in World War I, only to fall under its rule again during World War II, in 1940. As the USSR began to fray in the late 1980s, pro-independence movements gathered steam in the Singing Revolution, events where protesters gathered to sing patriotic songs in defiance of their Soviet overlords. On August 23, 1989, some 500,000 people formed a human chain linking Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius; the following year, all three countries held free elections and declared their independence from the USSR. 'Similar but different' is one way to describe the neighbours, who have shared common enemies and some traditions (celebrating the summer solstice is a big deal in the Baltics) but who speak different languages and follow different branches of Christianity (Lithuania is majority Catholic while Estonia and Latvia have traditionally leaned more Orthodox or Lutheran). All three joined NATO in 2004; Poland joined in 1999, Finland in 2023, Sweden in 2024; Norway is a founding member from 1949. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, relatively porous borders are being reinforced to at least prevent the kind of surprise attack that Russia launched on the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in 2022 (which ultimately failed). Narva's Friendship Bridge is closed to vehicles and pitted with 'dragon's teeth' – the anti-tank obstacles that have proved successful at slowing armoured advances in Ukraine. 'It's a question of when they will start the next war,' said Kaja Kallas, Estonia's then-prime minister, in 2024. NATO's eastern flank is undergoing 'serious rearmament', Joris Van Bladel tells us from the Egmont Institute in Brussels. 'Russia talks in big numbers but often underdelivers. There is a structural gap between declared intent and actual capability. Russian forces are rarely efficient but they are effective. They persist. That is their strength.' Lithuania's intelligence agency believes Russia aims to increase its stocks of troops, equipment and weapons on its Baltic and Scandinavian borders by up to 50 per cent. 'In the medium term, Russia is unlikely to be able to build up the capabilities needed for a large-scale conventional war against NATO,' it said. 'However, Russia may develop military capabilities sufficient to launch a limited military action against one or several NATO countries.' Loading At its summit in The Hague this week, NATO committed each member nation to increasing their military spend t o their 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 (though only 3.5 per cent will be in core military spending, with the remainder on the likes of infrastructure, intelligence and cybersecurity). The three Baltic states had already pledged to increase their defence budgets: Estonia to 5.4 per cent of GDP by 2029, Latvia to 3.45 per cent of GDP for 2025 and Lithuania to between 5 and 6 per cent of GDP from 2026 to 2030. Compared to Russia, the nations are minnows: Estonia (population 1.4 million) has just over 7000 of its own regular military personnel; Latvia (population 1.9 million) has 6500; Lithuania, the largest with 2.8 million people, has some 23,000 in active service. All have reserves and volunteer forces; Latvia has reintroduced military compulsory service for men aged 18 to 27 (it's optional for women). NATO also has an 'enhanced forward presence' in each of the three countries with a few thousands troops in multinational battle groups. Russia, in contrast, has some 1.3 million personnel on active service and an additional 2 million in reserve. In theory, all NATO states would come to the immediate aid of a Baltic nation under threat. However, says Van Bladel, 'the Kremlin increasingly perceives the alliance as being in crisis due to erratic and chaotic signals from the Trump administration, persistent European military weaknesses, and dissenting voices on the Russian threat, particularly from Hungary [led by strongman Viktor Orban] and Slovakia [led by Robert Fico whose visit to the Kremlin in January set off a wave of protests at home]. This perception may tempt the Kremlin to test NATO's resolve under Article 5, or at the very least, to adopt a more risk-tolerant posture.' While Article 5 is generally taken to mean that member nations will come to the aid of others in the alliance that come under attack, in practice each country can make its own decision on how it responds in the circumstances, according to NATO. 'This assistance is taken forward in concert with other Allies. It is not necessarily military and depends on the material resources of each country. It is therefore left to the judgment of each individual member country to determine how it will contribute.' The risk of increasing NATO's presence in the Baltics, meanwhile, is that it would be characterised by Russia as a provocation. In April, the Russian director of foreign intelligence, Sergey Naryshkin, told a state news agency that Poland and the Baltic states, in particular, would be targeted by Russia in the event of NATO 'aggression'. 'Poland and the Baltic republics are particularly aggressive, at least in words, they are constantly rattling their weapons,' he said. 'They should understand, although they do not yet understand, that in the event of aggression from the North Atlantic Alliance against the Union State [Russia], damage will certainly be inflicted on the entire NATO bloc, but to a greater extent the first to suffer will be the bearers of such ideas among the political circles of Poland and the Baltic countries.' NATO strategy, claimed former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas in 2022, was for Baltic forces to briefly frustrate a Russian advance while a counter-punch could be mustered from NATO's main forces to push them back. But, she said, 'If you compare the sizes of Ukraine and the Baltic countries, it would mean the complete destruction of countries and our culture.' This is not particularly appealing to everyday people in the Baltics. 'It turns out,' says Daiva Sveikackaitė, 'that if an aggressor attacked Lithuania, NATO [main forces] would reach us in maybe a week, which would allow the enemy to enter the depths of the country and only then begin to stop the enemy. Our country is small – from west to east the border is only up to 400 kilometres – so, war would devastate in an instant.' All in the Baltics remember the catastrophic damage inflicted in World War II when Russian and German armies fought over this contested turf. Each lost between 15 and 30 per cent of their populations to brutal fighting and successive waves of deportations (the Russians shipping thousands of suspected political prisoners to Siberian gulags; the Germans rounding up and murdering much of the Baltics' Jewish population). Narva itself was almost completely obliterated and was later rebuilt as a Soviet model town of grey-brick apartment blocks, to house some of the half-million or so Russians who migrated, or were moved, to Estonia for a (slightly) better life than they had on the windswept steppe. Some Russians, or Russian-speakers born there, now exist in a legal limbo: after independence, Estonia decreed that only those who had lived there before the Russian occupation in 1940, and their descendants, automatically qualified for citizenship. Others could try passing a test. Some were issued with so-called grey passports, giving them right of abode but limited access to the wider EU; some still have only Russian passports. As Estonia cracks down on Russian culture – pulling down old monuments, banning Russian cable TV channels – there's a risk of internal friction between the old-timers and the Russian 'newcomers'. Moreover, 'There remains, in certain quarters, an undercurrent of loyalty to Russia within the Russian community,' notes The Economist. Russia, for its part, has accused Estonia of 'total Russophobia'. What could happen next? Of the three nations, Lithuania is in a unique predicament, wedged between Belarus to the east (a Russian puppet state that's given safe harbour to Russian nuclear weapons) and, to the west, the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian 'exclave' that's home to Russia's Baltic naval fleet. Kaliningrad is a curious territory, an accident of history. Once known as Königsberg, part of Germany, the Allies gave it to Russia at the end of World War II, but it was cut off from the motherland when the Baltics gained independence, leaving it a strange, albeit strategically useful, island in a sea of NATO allies. A map, above, helps to visualise this geographic oddity, but what's critical is the distance from Russian ally Belarus to Russia's Kaliningrad – just 100 kilometres, a few hours by tank, along the border between Poland and Lithuania, a stretch that has become known as the Suwałki Gap (named after a Polish town). Should hostilities break out, Russian troops would be expected to swarm out of Belarus, across the Gap, cutting off Lithuania and its Baltic neighbours from Poland and the rest of Europe. (Side note: Belarus fell into line with Russia after the Kremlin helped its strongman president, Alexander Lukashenko, to quash protests following his election win in 2020, which was widely considered to have been rigged. Belarus's opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was forced into exile in Vilnius, where she lives in a home heavily secured against interference by Russian agents.) To give themselves more of a fighting chance, last year, Lithuania withdrew from the international convention banning cluster munitions, tiny 'bomblets' that can scatter over wide areas of land to surprise advancing forces (but can harm civilians for decades thereafter); earlier this year, both Estonia and Latvia also pulled out of an international convention banning anti-personnel mines, allowing them to mine their borders against Russia. The United Nations believes that Russia, which is not a signatory to the cluster munition convention, has deployed cluster munitions at least two dozen times to date in Ukraine. Leaving the convention was not something taken lightly, says Pabriks, who was Latvia's foreign minister when the tiny nation signed up to the anti-mine Ottawa Convention in 2005. 'For the last one-and-a-half years, I have been arguing we have to go out of this convention because Russians are using these mines already now in Ukraine,' he says. 'It doesn't mean that we will use them immediately and that we will dig them in tomorrow, right? We simply want to say, just like nuclear deterrence, 'If you come we might use them.' We don't want to tie our hands when we need to defend our families.' More than three years of war in Ukraine has at least given the Baltics time to prepare, says Daiva Sveikackaitė from Vilnius. 'We became convinced that we will have to defend our country with our own strength. Society has become more patriotic, active with humanitarian support. We have many discussions about defence options. The plan is to resist and hold out. In reality, Lithuanians have received three safe years for preparation, understanding that Russia is a monster, that we do not intend to give up our homeland and will defend ourselves by all means.' Earlier this month, all three Baltic states signed a deal to co-operate should a mass evacuation be needed. 'It is important for the Baltic countries to maintain a unified approach and co-ordinate actions when threats arise, in order to ensure the safety of our people,' said Lithuania's Interior Minister Vladislav Kondratovic, 'especially in the event of large-scale evacuation.' Loading In the short term, with war in Ukraine ongoing, the risk of Russian assault is limited, says Van Bladel. 'Russia's capacity for a second major ground campaign is constrained,' he says. 'Most forces are tied down in Ukraine, focused on training, rotating reservists and adapting to drone warfare.' Over a longer term, he says, it's a different story. 'We must not confuse short-term limitations with long-term strategic intent. Russian doctrine is clear: NATO's eastern flank is a theatre of interest. Over the midterm, five to seven years, especially if the regime consolidates post-Ukraine, the threat could become real.' Says Matti Pesu from Finland: 'We don't want to see any escalation but then NATO, and particularly Finland, wants to also signal strength and resolve.' Is war in the region inevitable? No, says Pabriks. 'Maybe it will never happen.' But we have to learn from history, he says. 'We have been living through the Soviet occupation, deportations, killings. We are not afraid to die for our freedom.'

Sydney Morning Herald

9 hours ago

Sydney Morning Herald

‘A question of when': Why Russia's next move could be on the Baltics

What and where, exactly, are the Baltic states? Those who live there have heard this so often they've learned to hide their eye-rolls and offer up some ready-made responses instead. Hence, Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a picturesque cobblestoned city on the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe, is sometimes described as a chilly version of (Italy's) Milan or a southern alternative to (Finland's) Helsinki. Nearby Lithuania's enterprising tourist board made a tote bag that said, 'I only date people who know where [the capital] Vilnius is' and dreamed up a famously risque campaign showing a woman tangled up in bedsheets with the slogan: 'Vilnius. The G-spot of Europe. Nobody knows where it is, but when you find it – it's amazing.' Nearby Latvia, meanwhile, has tried the somewhat tamer ad line ' Neighbours tend to surprise ' to raise awareness of the medieval architecture of its ancient capital, Riga, and its food culture (try sparkling birch sap or the pelēkie zirņi ar speķi, a traditional stew of peas and bacon). Nobody who studies geopolitics, however, is in any doubt about the regional importance of the Baltics. The three little nations, wedged between Russia and the Nordic countries, would likely be first in line should Vladimir Putin send his armies westward into Europe. Memories run deep here: many in these states, which were occupied by the Soviet Union for half a century from 1940, have not-so-distant recollections of harsh totalitarian rule. The war in Ukraine has revived these fears: are they next on Vladimir Putin's to-do list? Complicating the picture is the Baltic states', and their neighbours', memberships of NATO , the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – which met in The Hague for its annual summit on June 24 – and its critical Article 5, which considers an attack on an individual member nation an attack on them all. Unlike Russia's 2022 attack on Ukraine (which is not in NATO so did not automatically trigger a response), if Putin's tanks roll over the 'Friendship Bridge' into the Estonian border town of Narva, a wider conflict could rapidly develop. 'This will not be a walk in the park,' Artis Pabriks, former Latvian Minister for Defence, tells us from Riga. But how likely is Russian aggression in the Baltics? What efforts are the Baltic states making to prepare for it? And what is the 'choke point' known as the Suwalki Gap? What's been going on in the Baltic Sea? It has quite a bottleneck, the Baltic Sea. A major shipping route in northern Europe – stretching from the Russian port of St Petersburg in the east to Denmark's Copenhagen in the west – it is completely enclosed, like a vast lake, to its north, south and east, fed by rivers pouring off glaciers in Sweden and Finland. It's shallow and brackish in parts and full of fishing vessels, commercial cargo, ferries, warships, submarines, wind farms and all manner of underground cables and pipelines. Where it meets the Atlantic, in the west, ships must navigate an archipelago of some 400 islands, a handful of which are big enough to warrant joining up with bridges or ferries, others so tiny they are classified as skerries, derived from the Old Norse word for 'rock in the sea'. Many vessels pass through here at a pinch point called The Sound, or Oresund, an occasionally shallow passage that's just four kilometres across at one point and that can ice over in winter. To the east, meanwhile, the sea broadens and forks into a Y, one leg stretching towards the Baltic states and St Petersburg, the other separating Finland and Sweden. 'The most obvious thing the countries share is the sea itself,' writes Oliver Moody in his recently published overview of the region, Baltic: The Future of Europe. 'They have had to learn to collectively steward a heavily polluted and ecologically fragile body of water, laced with daisy chains of gas pipelines, electricity and data cables, and above all the shipping routes on which most of their imports and exports depend. Most glaringly, they have been thrust together by Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine.' Here and there, up pops an island of particular strategic importance. Sweden's Gotland, the largest, sits slap-bang between Scandinavia and Latvia and is directly in the path of Russian traffic departing St Petersburg for the Atlantic. It's been called 'Sweden's unsinkable aircraft carrier': in a time of crisis, it could host thousands of troops (as it did during the Cold War) and fighter jets that could strike passing vessels. Since 2022, Gotland has endured a series of odd events, including a mysterious pump failure that could have left its inhabitants without drinking water and a severed internet cable, prompting Sweden to deploy warships to monitor the Baltic for 'potential sabotage'. The attacks were widely suspected to be Russian dirty tricks, part of a shadow war of cyber warfare, propaganda hacks, cables damaged by ships 'accidentally' dragging their anchors, GPS jamming that affects commercial flights, even attempts to sabotage cargo aircraft with incendiary devices disguised as parcels. 'They are fragmenting the West, trying simply to penetrate us and to make us weaker,' says Artis Pabriks, now chairman of Latvia's Military Technology, Drones and Robotics Association. Few attacks, if any, have been directly linked to, or claimed by, Russia; yet all have been apparently designed to destabilise and unsettle, observers believe. The incidents have been largely concentrated on NATO's eastern flank, where Estonia, Finland, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland brush up against Russia, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. 'It's a hybrid war,' said General Veiko-Vello Palm, Deputy Commander of the Estonian Defence Forces, in 2023. 'The most serious threat is cyber-related, our communications and IT systems are under constant attack.' In April, NATO's top commander, US general Christopher Cavoli, said Russia intended to triple the size of its military after the war in Ukraine ends and would build up its military presence on its borders with Finland and the Baltic states. First in the firing line could be Lithuania, former CIA director general David Petraeus told a webinar run by UK think tank Policy Exchange in late May. 'Lithuania has featured prominently in [Putin's] speeches – and we should be listening.' In December, Finland impounded an oil tanker while it investigated the suspected sabotage of undersea cables at Russia's behest. 'We've witnessed unattributed incidents against critical infrastructure, but we don't really know who the perpetrator is,' Matti Pesu tells us from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, where he is a senior research fellow. 'The incidents may have been accidents, but they've been so frequent that it's unlikely that all of them would be.' Finland's president, Alexander Stubb, last year told a gathering of security experts in Helsinki to expect a rise in information war, sabotage, cyber attacks and attacks on civilian infrastructure. Finland is no stranger to Russian belligerence. It was forced to cede a tenth of its territory to its neighbour after the brutal Winter War of November 1939, when Russia opportunistically invaded while the rest of the world was distracted by events elsewhere. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Finland has closed its 1340-kilometre border with Russia, cut trade ties and now has enough underground bomb shelters to house 4.8 million of its 5.6 million people. Some are big enough to house heated swimming pools, skate parks and soccer pitches, for use in normal times, with spartan bunk rooms ready to accommodate families should the worst happen. Norway also shares a border with Russia, way up in the Arctic, just 195 kilometres long and with a single formal crossing. Between the Norwegian town of Storskog and Borisoglebsky in Russia, it's not more than a few hours' drive to Severomorsk, Russia's primary base for its fleet of nuclear submarines. Norway closed its side of the border to most traffic in May last year, though there are some exceptions, such as Russians allowed to cross to visit family members. How worried are people in the Baltic nations? Until recently, Narva, a town with an ancient fortress by the River Narva on Estonia's eastern border, was a thoroughfare for Russian trade and tourism. Ninety-five per cent of its residents are native Russian speakers, many descended from people who relocated here (voluntarily or otherwise) from the USSR after it annexed Estonia in 1940. Today, they look across the Friendship Bridge that joins the two nations and wonder when tanks might roll across it. All eyes are on Narva, wine importer Giuseppe Bassi tells us from Limoncello, the wine bar he runs in the old part of Estonia's capital, Tallinn. Were a 'provocation' to happen, he says, fears are it would go down in Narva, which he calls 'the most Russian city in Estonia'. Lithuanians, too, have long memories of Russian brutality, says Daiva Sveikackaitė, an artist and commentator in the capital, Vilnius. 'The older generation remembers the USSR very well,' she tells us. 'The planned economy seemed to provide planned security. But that censorship of real history, the lack of freedom of speech, the fear in the memory of the elders about the deportations after World War II … the Lithuanian people did not forget their roots and former independence.' The Baltics each declared their independence from Russia in 1918, after its defeat in World War I, only to fall under its rule again during World War II, in 1940. As the USSR began to fray in the late 1980s, pro-independence movements gathered steam in the Singing Revolution, events where protesters gathered to sing patriotic songs in defiance of their Soviet overlords. On August 23, 1989, some 500,000 people formed a human chain linking Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius; the following year, all three countries held free elections and declared their independence from the USSR. 'Similar but different' is one way to describe the neighbours, who have shared common enemies and some traditions (celebrating the summer solstice is a big deal in the Baltics) but who speak different languages and follow different branches of Christianity (Lithuania is majority Catholic while Estonia and Latvia have traditionally leaned more Orthodox or Lutheran). All three joined NATO in 2004; Poland joined in 1999, Finland in 2023, Sweden in 2024; Norway is a founding member from 1949. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, relatively porous borders are being reinforced to at least prevent the kind of surprise attack that Russia launched on the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in 2022 (which ultimately failed). Narva's Friendship Bridge is closed to vehicles and pitted with 'dragon's teeth' – the anti-tank obstacles that have proved successful at slowing armoured advances in Ukraine. 'It's a question of when they will start the next war,' said Kaja Kallas, Estonia's then-prime minister, in 2024. NATO's eastern flank is undergoing 'serious rearmament', Joris Van Bladel tells us from the Egmont Institute in Brussels. 'Russia talks in big numbers but often underdelivers. There is a structural gap between declared intent and actual capability. Russian forces are rarely efficient but they are effective. They persist. That is their strength.' Lithuania's intelligence agency believes Russia aims to increase its stocks of troops, equipment and weapons on its Baltic and Scandinavian borders by up to 50 per cent. 'In the medium term, Russia is unlikely to be able to build up the capabilities needed for a large-scale conventional war against NATO,' it said. 'However, Russia may develop military capabilities sufficient to launch a limited military action against one or several NATO countries.' Loading At its summit in The Hague this week, NATO committed each member nation to increasing their military spend t o their 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 (though only 3.5 per cent will be in core military spending, with the remainder on the likes of infrastructure, intelligence and cybersecurity). The three Baltic states had already pledged to increase their defence budgets: Estonia to 5.4 per cent of GDP by 2029, Latvia to 3.45 per cent of GDP for 2025 and Lithuania to between 5 and 6 per cent of GDP from 2026 to 2030. Compared to Russia, the nations are minnows: Estonia (population 1.4 million) has just over 7000 of its own regular military personnel; Latvia (population 1.9 million) has 6500; Lithuania, the largest with 2.8 million people, has some 23,000 in active service. All have reserves and volunteer forces; Latvia has reintroduced military compulsory service for men aged 18 to 27 (it's optional for women). NATO also has an 'enhanced forward presence' in each of the three countries with a few thousands troops in multinational battle groups. Russia, in contrast, has some 1.3 million personnel on active service and an additional 2 million in reserve. In theory, all NATO states would come to the immediate aid of a Baltic nation under threat. However, says Van Bladel, 'the Kremlin increasingly perceives the alliance as being in crisis due to erratic and chaotic signals from the Trump administration, persistent European military weaknesses, and dissenting voices on the Russian threat, particularly from Hungary [led by strongman Viktor Orban] and Slovakia [led by Robert Fico whose visit to the Kremlin in January set off a wave of protests at home]. This perception may tempt the Kremlin to test NATO's resolve under Article 5, or at the very least, to adopt a more risk-tolerant posture.' While Article 5 is generally taken to mean that member nations will come to the aid of others in the alliance that come under attack, in practice each country can make its own decision on how it responds in the circumstances, according to NATO. 'This assistance is taken forward in concert with other Allies. It is not necessarily military and depends on the material resources of each country. It is therefore left to the judgment of each individual member country to determine how it will contribute.' The risk of increasing NATO's presence in the Baltics, meanwhile, is that it would be characterised by Russia as a provocation. In April, the Russian director of foreign intelligence, Sergey Naryshkin, told a state news agency that Poland and the Baltic states, in particular, would be targeted by Russia in the event of NATO 'aggression'. 'Poland and the Baltic republics are particularly aggressive, at least in words, they are constantly rattling their weapons,' he said. 'They should understand, although they do not yet understand, that in the event of aggression from the North Atlantic Alliance against the Union State [Russia], damage will certainly be inflicted on the entire NATO bloc, but to a greater extent the first to suffer will be the bearers of such ideas among the political circles of Poland and the Baltic countries.' NATO strategy, claimed former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas in 2022, was for Baltic forces to briefly frustrate a Russian advance while a counter-punch could be mustered from NATO's main forces to push them back. But, she said, 'If you compare the sizes of Ukraine and the Baltic countries, it would mean the complete destruction of countries and our culture.' This is not particularly appealing to everyday people in the Baltics. 'It turns out,' says Daiva Sveikackaitė, 'that if an aggressor attacked Lithuania, NATO [main forces] would reach us in maybe a week, which would allow the enemy to enter the depths of the country and only then begin to stop the enemy. Our country is small – from west to east the border is only up to 400 kilometres – so, war would devastate in an instant.' All in the Baltics remember the catastrophic damage inflicted in World War II when Russian and German armies fought over this contested turf. Each lost between 15 and 30 per cent of their populations to brutal fighting and successive waves of deportations (the Russians shipping thousands of suspected political prisoners to Siberian gulags; the Germans rounding up and murdering much of the Baltics' Jewish population). Narva itself was almost completely obliterated and was later rebuilt as a Soviet model town of grey-brick apartment blocks, to house some of the half-million or so Russians who migrated, or were moved, to Estonia for a (slightly) better life than they had on the windswept steppe. Some Russians, or Russian-speakers born there, now exist in a legal limbo: after independence, Estonia decreed that only those who had lived there before the Russian occupation in 1940, and their descendants, automatically qualified for citizenship. Others could try passing a test. Some were issued with so-called grey passports, giving them right of abode but limited access to the wider EU; some still have only Russian passports. As Estonia cracks down on Russian culture – pulling down old monuments, banning Russian cable TV channels – there's a risk of internal friction between the old-timers and the Russian 'newcomers'. Moreover, 'There remains, in certain quarters, an undercurrent of loyalty to Russia within the Russian community,' notes The Economist. Russia, for its part, has accused Estonia of 'total Russophobia'. What could happen next? Of the three nations, Lithuania is in a unique predicament, wedged between Belarus to the east (a Russian puppet state that's given safe harbour to Russian nuclear weapons) and, to the west, the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian 'exclave' that's home to Russia's Baltic naval fleet. Kaliningrad is a curious territory, an accident of history. Once known as Königsberg, part of Germany, the Allies gave it to Russia at the end of World War II, but it was cut off from the motherland when the Baltics gained independence, leaving it a strange, albeit strategically useful, island in a sea of NATO allies. A map, above, helps to visualise this geographic oddity, but what's critical is the distance from Russian ally Belarus to Russia's Kaliningrad – just 100 kilometres, a few hours by tank, along the border between Poland and Lithuania, a stretch that has become known as the Suwałki Gap (named after a Polish town). Should hostilities break out, Russian troops would be expected to swarm out of Belarus, across the Gap, cutting off Lithuania and its Baltic neighbours from Poland and the rest of Europe. (Side note: Belarus fell into line with Russia after the Kremlin helped its strongman president, Alexander Lukashenko, to quash protests following his election win in 2020, which was widely considered to have been rigged. Belarus's opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was forced into exile in Vilnius, where she lives in a home heavily secured against interference by Russian agents.) To give themselves more of a fighting chance, last year, Lithuania withdrew from the international convention banning cluster munitions, tiny 'bomblets' that can scatter over wide areas of land to surprise advancing forces (but can harm civilians for decades thereafter); earlier this year, both Estonia and Latvia also pulled out of an international convention banning anti-personnel mines, allowing them to mine their borders against Russia. The United Nations believes that Russia, which is not a signatory to the cluster munition convention, has deployed cluster munitions at least two dozen times to date in Ukraine. Leaving the convention was not something taken lightly, says Pabriks, who was Latvia's foreign minister when the tiny nation signed up to the anti-mine Ottawa Convention in 2005. 'For the last one-and-a-half years, I have been arguing we have to go out of this convention because Russians are using these mines already now in Ukraine,' he says. 'It doesn't mean that we will use them immediately and that we will dig them in tomorrow, right? We simply want to say, just like nuclear deterrence, 'If you come we might use them.' We don't want to tie our hands when we need to defend our families.' More than three years of war in Ukraine has at least given the Baltics time to prepare, says Daiva Sveikackaitė from Vilnius. 'We became convinced that we will have to defend our country with our own strength. Society has become more patriotic, active with humanitarian support. We have many discussions about defence options. The plan is to resist and hold out. In reality, Lithuanians have received three safe years for preparation, understanding that Russia is a monster, that we do not intend to give up our homeland and will defend ourselves by all means.' Earlier this month, all three Baltic states signed a deal to co-operate should a mass evacuation be needed. 'It is important for the Baltic countries to maintain a unified approach and co-ordinate actions when threats arise, in order to ensure the safety of our people,' said Lithuania's Interior Minister Vladislav Kondratovic, 'especially in the event of large-scale evacuation.' Loading In the short term, with war in Ukraine ongoing, the risk of Russian assault is limited, says Van Bladel. 'Russia's capacity for a second major ground campaign is constrained,' he says. 'Most forces are tied down in Ukraine, focused on training, rotating reservists and adapting to drone warfare.' Over a longer term, he says, it's a different story. 'We must not confuse short-term limitations with long-term strategic intent. Russian doctrine is clear: NATO's eastern flank is a theatre of interest. Over the midterm, five to seven years, especially if the regime consolidates post-Ukraine, the threat could become real.' Says Matti Pesu from Finland: 'We don't want to see any escalation but then NATO, and particularly Finland, wants to also signal strength and resolve.' Is war in the region inevitable? No, says Pabriks. 'Maybe it will never happen.' But we have to learn from history, he says. 'We have been living through the Soviet occupation, deportations, killings. We are not afraid to die for our freedom.'

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