Be Prepared

My son and I were checking out the progress on the renovation of the garden house.  His friend was called up recently for a three-week preparedness drill near the border of Kaliningrad.  The military doesn't let reserves use live rounds of ammunition or even blanks, so they had to literally shout "bam bam" when pretending to shoot their rifles.  They all got sick with COVID after the first week, forced to live in very close confines.  They tried to battle it as best they could, as they wanted to finish the training so that they would be free to get back to their lives, but the military doctor declared them too sick for duty and sent them home in the middle of the second week, so they will have to repeat it all over again at a later date.  Needless to say, his friend was upset by the experience, wondering just what good, if any, this training exercise did.  One can only hope that active duty military has better training and conditions.

There are all sorts of maneuvers going on at the moment, as the Lithuanian military is working with US and NATO forces on how best to defend the Suwalki Gap between Belarus and Kaliningrad. Hard to believe but we recently celebrated 18 years of NATO membership.  It has been publicly stated on Russian television that one of the Kremlin's long range goals is to create a permanent link to its military base in Kaliningrad.  Currently, it relies on an access corridor through Lithuania.  This was the situation in Ukraine before 2014, when Russia leased its military base on Crimea.  So, one has to be ready for such maximalist objectives here.

Overall, the mood is pretty good though, as Spring has made a couple of false starts and should be in full bloom in the coming weeks.  Restaurants are already beginning to prepare for the warm season, putting out their outdoor furniture, stringing lights through the trees of one of the favorite Žverynas venues - Panama Food Garden - where a colleague invited us to lunch the other day.  

If nothing else the war in Ukraine has bought time.  Just the same, the ministry of defense urges citizens to be ready and is offering classes in emergency preparedness.  We have been preparing for such a contingency since 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.  We bought backpacks, sleeping bags and other necessary camping equipment.  Daina double checks the survival guide the defense department has posted on its website.  Like the Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared."  We even tested our "survival skills" with weekend canoe trips during past summers.

Meanwhile, the Russian military licks its wounds as it plots a new strategic course, consolidating its troops in the eastern flank of Ukraine in yet another anticipated assault on Mariupol, claiming the entire Azov coastline for itself.  After that, it can move westward at its own pace, knowing it has the full weight of its armed forces behind it.  This should have been the strategy from the beginning, but Putin got greedy and thought he could speed up the process by swooping down from the North to take Kyiv, and cut out the heart of the country.

I've been in a little argument with one of my last surviving forum friends over Donbas, which Russia has claimed as its own.  Russian forces have yet to take over the entire oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk, which comprise the region, but are gaining ground each day.  The question is who owns Donbas?  Is this a Russian enclave on the eastern flank of Ukraine, as many seem to think, or is it an integral part of Ukraine?  One quick reference point is the 1991 referendum vote on Ukrainian independence.  More than 80% of residents in these two oblasts voted for independence, thereby joining the newly independent state of Ukraine.  The turnout of voters was 80 percent.

This is unlike Transnistria, which voted against joining Moldova, and has remained a tiny unrecognized state since 1990.  Russia currently has military forces located there as well, and has been lobbing missiles at Lviv from time to time just to remind Ukrainians they are still there.  Such was the case with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Northern Georgia, but these tiny self-proclaimed republics had the luxury of Russia being at its back door. Interesting that when Russia defended these two states' right to self-determination in 2008, they didn't make any effort to unite Ossetia, as the Northern half remains within Russia.  Transnistria is all alone, which is another reason Putin seems to want to conquer most if not all of Ukraine, connecting it once again to Russia.  

Another scenario outlined by Ilya Ponomarev, a former Duma member now fighting for Ukraine, is that the Kremlin wanted to cleave off the eastern half of the country to create a puppet state, and divide the western half between Poland and Hungary, which it considered sympathetic to its cause.  Foiled by these countries embracing the EU position against the war, Medvedev has lashed out at Poland in recent speeches. 

One can argue that any regional state has the right to self-determination, but as we learned in Spain that is not so.  The Spanish government rejected Catalonia's bid for independence, and the EU supported Spain.  Carles Puigdemont, who initiated that referendum in 2016, has been living a life of exile ever since.  

However, Catalonia would have had a much better chance of surviving as an independent state than would any of these Russian vassal states, given its vast sea coast and major Mediterranean port of Barcelona.  These semi-autonomous Slavic states subsist entirely on the support of Russia, with little if any major resources of their own, and as such would not be viable international states.  

Donbas may be the exception, as it is a coal mining region and has a large industrial infrastructure, created during the Soviet era.  By combining the two oblasts into one republic, it would have a link to the Sea of Azov, provided that Russia is able to eventually capture Mariupol.  The city has been reduced to rubble after nearly 40 days of shelling, with the Red Cross and other humanitarian services trying to reach the remaining 150,000 inhabitants who are trapped in the besieged city.  However, much of the region is ethnic Ukrainian, not Russian.  In order to achieve this objective, Russia would have to forcibly remove or "evacuate" the unwilling Ukrainian citizens and fill them in with Russian transplants, similar to what it did in Crimea in 2014. 

This is truly annexation by force.  There is no free will here.  What you have is a couple of renegade separatist leaders, who hold onto small fractions of the oblasts they claim to represent.  Both Denis Pushilin (Donetsk) and Leonid Pasechnik (Luhansk) are petty local autocrats who seized power in 2014, proclaiming themselves heads of state.  They have been able to mount a resistance for 8 years thanks largely to the help of the Wagner Group, a paramilitary unit created by Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitri Utkin to serve the Kremlin's interests, much like the dogs in Animal Farm.  Prigozhin literally took Richard Wagner's moniker, being Hitler's favorite composer.  Since fighting broke out in 2014, the Wagner Group has grown from less than 1000 "green men" to over 6000, and have many documented human rights abuses, not just in Ukraine but in Syria and war-torn African countries as well.  This is how Putin has been able to wash his hands clean of the matter by claiming this rebellion to be internal.  Yet, here he is now making no such pretexts, and actively trying to annex the region in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Putin apologists will say that the Wagner Group is no less malevolent than Blackwater or the other private armies the US used in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, Blackwater would love nothing more than to offer its guns for hire to Ukraine, but Pres. Zelenskyy knows that two wrongs don't make a right.  He already has to deal with unsavory elements within his own ranks, and doesn't want to add more fuel to the fire in Russia's claims that "neo-Nazis" rule Ukraine.  Zelenskyy recently ousted two generals over questionable allegiances.

What worries Lithuanians, and indeed Latvians and Estonians, is that Russia would use similar tactics here.  Narva is predominantly Russian and sits on the border.  You can literally view Russia on the other side of the river that spills into the Baltic Sea.  I remember running along this beach in 1998 before coming up to border guards.  Like Donbas, residents voted to join Estonia's independence bid in 1991. But, who is to say the mayor of the small city doesn't decide to declare independence and solicit the help of the Wagner Group to defend the breakaway republic?  Putin would then feel the need to defend threatened Russians and mount a "special military operation" in Estonia, perhaps the easiest of the three Baltic countries to annex.  The only difference is that NATO would then be obliged to step in.

This is why NATO is so important.  It is a security blanket, especially when you are a country the size of a postage stamp on the European continent.  It is also the reason NATO is beefing up forces in the Baltic states, and the US seriously considering permanent military bases.  One can argue, as John Mearhsheimer has done, that NATO is responsible for this unrest by choosing to expand into Eastern Europe, but what other assurances do these countries have?  They certainly didn't have any such assurances between the world wars, when Stalinist Russia and Hitler Germany carved up Eastern Europe in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or after the WWII when Britain and the US essentially ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.  These countries know that Russia will forever try to dominate the region as it is currently doing in Ukraine.

Lithuania has invested two per cent of its GDP in its military and has done a lot in terms of readiness, but it realizes it is no match for Russia.  The only advantage it has is that the Suwalki Gap is just as important to Poland as it is to Lithuania and that it would be united in its efforts to protect this narrow stretch of land separating Kaliningrad from Belarus.  It's Lithuania's land bridge to Europe.

My son and I were going over escape routes in our heads, and the only way out of the country in times of war is through this gap.  You don't want to be stuck out at sea.  Meanwhile, we work to make the garden house as energy sustainable as possible so that we have a safe house if god forbid Russia were to invade Lithuania.  Seeing Ukrainians struggle to survive in besieged cities like Mariupol with no running water and limited supplies of food gives one pause.  Nevertheless, our preferred course of action would be to escape the country, as many Ukrainians have done.

For now, we enjoy the Spring days.  We continue to make life comfortable for the Ukrainians in our old flat.  The little boy and little girl both celebrated birthdays this past week, and we bought a bed frame so that Maryna and her young son will no longer sleep on a mattress on the floor.  She seems to have renewed hope, not so much of returning to Ukraine, but assessing her options in Vilnius, which she told Daina is a very warm comfortable city.  They chatted while I put the Ikea bed together.  Many Ukrainians have already chosen to live and work here.  She is trying to convince her husband, currently stationed in Lviv, to do the same.