Lithuania calls for NATO to deploy permanent military force near Russian border

NATO should scrap its constraints on setting up permanent defensive bases near Russia’s borders because the underlying treaty with Moscow is “dead”, the president of Lithuania has told The Times.

President Nauseda, 59, who is hosting a pivotal summit of the alliance’s leaders in Vilnius this week, also said that the West should not let itself be intimidated by President Putin’s nuclear blackmail and urged allies to make more haste about raising their military spending in a “very dangerous, very fragile” situation, The Times reports.

Alongside Ukraine’s prospects of NATO membership and the impasse over Sweden’s accession, one of the central issues on the table is the long-term plans to protect the alliance’s eastern flank against attack by Russia, including by placing more troops and equipment in frontier states to provide a credible deterrent.

The alliance has already stationed international forces in nine countries such as Poland and the Baltic states. However, these deployments are on a strictly rotational basis, with units often withdrawn after as little as six months because of a 1997 treaty with Russia that prohibits “permanent” NATO bases across much of the former eastern bloc under “current security circumstances”.

Lithuania and other allies argue that Putin has effectively killed this agreement with a series of aggressive steps. Last month Germany, which had previously defended the treaty, made a significant shift by announcing it would upgrade its presence in Lithuania to a “permanent” mechanised infantry brigade of about 4,000 soldiers as soon as the necessary barracks and training facilities were built on site.

“With Russia taking active steps to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus — and we have all the evidence that this is taking place — we should finally pronounce this NATO-Russia founding act dead,” Nauseda said. “Without such a step, it still contaminates thinking in some of the [NATO] capitals. It still keeps us in the grey zone of strategic ambivalence.”

A month ago Putin set alarm bells ringing in Western governments by claiming to have stationed low-yield “tactical” nuclear missiles in Belarus, which shares a border with three NATO member states and has already been subsumed into Russia for military purposes.

Several European intelligence agencies believe he has already stationed nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, Russia’s semi-exclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Nauseda said Putin seemed to have exaggerated his latest remarks but the “infrastructure” for the warheads had been moved into Belarus and it was probably only a matter of time before the missiles followed. “You know, we constantly hear these threats [of a Russian nuclear attack],” he said. “Maybe this is the reason why we have somehow got used to them.

“Also I would like to say that I think more and more allies understand that Putin is a gambler and all the threats he makes are not because he’s strong, but because he feels weak. I think this recent mutiny in Russia of the Wagner group showed his weakness for everyone.

“So we have to stay strong and this is probably the best deterrence: to stay strong, united and show that we cannot be intimidated by Vladimir Putin, because otherwise, Putin will receive signals of our vulnerability immediately. [Russia] will get to the conclusion that, OK, the Western countries are weak again, unable to take decisions and of course that will have a very negative impact on our decisions.”

At present the main source of discord within NATO is whether to use the summit to give Ukraine some kind of stronger commitment that it will be swiftly welcomed into the alliance if there is an armistice with Russia.

While Poland and the Baltic states have publicly pushed for Kyiv to be given hope of a rapid accession, they have run up against determined resistance from the United States and Germany, both of which believe this would be too risky a move and want more pressure on Ukraine to pass domestic reforms.

Looming over the debate is the spectre of NATO’s notorious Bucharest summit in 2008, when Ukraine and Georgia were told they would become members but received no detailed road maps.

“It would be a mistake if we repeat the same old formulas of Bucharest, not saying anything new to our friends, brothers and sisters in Ukraine,” Nauseda said. “I think [setting out] the clearest and shortest possible path for Ukraine to join the alliance would strengthen the Ukrainian state and especially it will strengthen their fighting spirit . . . Right now, in practice, it will not happen because the country’s at war.

“Of course, you can’t just take this country on board because then you have to talk about Article 5 [NATO’s mutual defence clause]. Well, that’s not possible, but our idea is that we have to send the signal [about] how to proceed if the war is over and if the conditions allow.”

There is more consensus among the NATO allies that the target for each member state to spend 2 per cent of its GDP on defence must from now on be treated as a bare minimum. However, Germany and more than a dozen other allies either have yet to hit this threshold or indicate how they propose to do so in the long run.

“For a long time, many countries had illusions about the Russian threat,” Nauseda said. “Now they understand very well that those threats are real and it is much easier or much less costly to build the deterrence and forward defence instead of having a war.

“Some countries maybe will need a longer time to adjust. Maybe it will take one, two or three years in order to be able to reach this benchmark of 2 per cent. But my concern is that this transitional period will take too long because the situation is really very dangerous, very fragile.”

In a separate guest article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Monday, Nauseda warned that if Russia successfully attacked NATO then Germany would ultimately be in the firing line, reminding readers of the brief Russian occupation of Berlin during the Seven Years’ War, in 1760; the Soviet offensive through Poland after the First World War; and the Red Army’s conquest of the German capital at the end of the Second World War. “Should Russia think of plunging Europe back into the dark times of global war, the Baltic states would certainly stand in its way,” he wrote.