One of the biggest frustrations among Lithuanian citizens is that the government hasn't done enough to prepare for the prospect of a Russian invasion. In Vilnius, we don't have a vast underground metro system like they have in Kyiv. All we have are basements, which aren't very bombproof if the Kremlin decides to launch air strikes on Vilnius in the near future. There are some old bunkers that were built during Soviet times but they haven't been kept up and are now infested with vermin. One journalist investigated these bunkers four years ago and the images were appalling.
Most of these bunkers date from the Cold War. Some go back to between the world wars. You can even visit an old nuclear missile base in the northwest part of the country, which we did a few years ago. It probably looks better than any other underground facility thanks largely to it being a popular tourist destination for Lithuanians and foreigners alike. However, nothing has been done since the Soviet era to bring these bunkers up to date. When parliament was called out on this, their response was to mandate fallout shelters in all new construction at the developers' expense. The rest of us are expected to hide out in our basements.
As such we have prepared our basement in event of war. Not that it would do much good after seeing the images of Mariupol and Gaza. Given that the Lithuanian government has been openly antagonistic to Russia and the city hall has a banner proudly proclaiming, "Putin, The Hague Is Waiting for You," it is safe to assume that Putin would show little mercy for Vilnius. So, it is with much trepidation that we find ourselves at the mercy of NATO for any kind of military deterrent to Russian aggression.
At present, NATO has about 3700 soldiers based in Lithuania. Another 1700 in Latvia and 2000 in Estonia. It is part of an "Enhanced Forward Presence" that has troops stationed throughout Eastern Europe with the biggest contingent in Poland. American soldiers provide the bulk of these forces, as does American artillery. There wasn't much danger of the US retracting its forces under the first Trump administration, as he tended to listen to his generals. However, that may change if we are to take Pete Hegseth and JD Vance at their word.
Both were in Europe this past week and boldly reiterated the administration's stance that European countries have to invest more in defense. For the record, the Eastern European countries have done just that. Poland spends a whopping 4.7 percent of its GDP on military defense. Sharing borders with Belarus and Ukraine have led to a stronger sense of security. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all spend 3% or more of their GDP on military defense. As you can see from this chart, even Germany now exceeds the 2% threshold Trump set during his first term. That isn't enough for the newest Team Trump, which has moved the goalpost to 5 percent, a number not even the US meets, but I suppose he has to show who is the boss!
No one really knows where these directives are coming from or if other NATO members have any say in the matter. One gets the sense that Trump is playing a game, much like with his tariffs, in an effort to break up NATO and the EU in order to pursue bilateral relations with favored nations.
There's nothing new here. Bush did the same back in the early 2000s. He played "New Europe," referring to Eastern Europe, off "Old Europe," as he likened the West. He felt that by bringing these Eastern European countries into NATO he could establish favorable bilateral ties and use the countries in his "war on terror." After 15 years, fatigue had set in and Trump tried to roll back this presence in his first term, only to be met with stern opposition from his generals and high-ranking Republican senators. This time around he doesn't appear to have anyone pushing back, as he seeks to weaken this trans-Atlantic military partnership, seemingly out of deference to his pal Vlad.
He had a long phone call with the Kremlin strong man, which politologists in Lithuania are comparing to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 that essentially gave Russia (then the Soviet Union) carte blanche to annex much of Eastern Europe, including the Baltics. Lithuania bounced around a bit during the war. First occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, then Germany in 1941, then the Soviet Union again in 1944. Needless to say, this phone call stirred very bad memories.
Ironically, Germany is the leading nation in the battalion currently stationed in Lithuania. Unlike Germany under Hitler, Germany today has no pretense of annexing Lithuania and turning it into farmland for German families, which Hitler had planned before his war effort crumbled in 1944.
Lithuanians would suffer more under the Soviet repressions after WWII when many were deported to Siberia to make room for Russian resettlement. The only thing that stopped Lithuania from being completely taken over by Russians were the "Forest Brothers." These were partisan forces that carried out a guerilla war with the Soviet Union for ten years. The Soviet Union was finally able to subdue this insurrection movement in the mid-1950s.
Even with nearly 50 years of Sovietism, the Lithuanian spirit remained intact, finding ways to subvert the system and having a "Spring" of its own in the early 1970s. This was known as the Kaunas Spring. Even when spirits were crushed, Lithuanians found ways to rebound. They never gave up. This resilience has been commemorated in film and theater, most notably in a movie made at the very end of Soviet rule, "Children of the Hotel America," in which the kids of that era tried to stage their own Woodstock.
I don't think any American really knows what it is like to lose his or her freedom and then struggle for half a century to regain it. Lithuanians have done this twice. The first time came with the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1918. For a brief period, Lithuania regained its independence between the wars, before having it stripped away with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Many Lithuanians, including my father-in-law, witnessed both these periods, albeit he was a toddler in the 1930s.
You will find this throughout Eastern Europe. No part of Europe has had to struggle for its independence as Eastern European countries have. If they didn't lose their sovereignty all together, they were forced into the Soviet orbit through the Warsaw Pact and made subservient to the dictates of Moscow. This is why so many Eastern European leaders recoiled when they heard Hegseth and Vance proudly boast how the US calls the shots, treating the European countries as if they are merely satellites orbiting Trump's America. The utter lack of sensitivity to the existential crisis many Eastern Europeans feel right now is appalling!
Not only have Eastern Europeans spent more on defense, they long ago warned the West of Putin's imperial ambitions. It began not in 2022, or even 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea, but in 2007 when Moscow launched a series of cyberattacks on Estonia in response to the government pulling down Soviet-era statues, including the "Bronze Soldier" representing the Soviet victory in WWII. This war has been going on for the better part of 20 years, but the West hardly took notice until Russia had the audacity to invade Ukraine.
Yet, we hear Trump's minions talk as if Ukraine started the war. Trump proudly proclaims it never would have happened on his watch, yet he did little to deter Putin the four years he was in office. In fact, the Russian president bided his time until he had his forces in place to launch his mammoth assault in February 2022.
Much to everyone's surprise, even Donald's, Ukraine repelled that attack and had a chance to literally push Russian forces into the Azov Sea, but Elon Musk pulled the plug on Starlink and the Biden administration refused to bolster Ukrainian forces when they badly needed it, so Russia was allowed to dig in all along the Dnipro River and effectively split Ukraine. Now it is the most heavily mined region in the world with an estimated 2 million landmines blocking Ukrainian forces from advancing into the war-torn region. As a result the war has turned into a long slog, with the US and NATO allies giving just enough military ordnance to allow Ukraine to hold Russia back, but not enough to regain its lost territory.
In this scenario, Ukraine finds itself at a crossroads. It can continue to resist Russia at great cost to itself or it can settle for a so-called "peace deal" negotiated by Team Trump that would give away roughly a quarter of its sovereign land. In turn, Russia would heavily militarize the region as they have already done in Crimea, creating a situation not much unlike North and South Korea. Only West Ukraine would have little assurance that the US and NATO would have its back should Russia choose to renew its assault in three or four years' time. For that matter no Eastern European country would feel safe if the US brokered such a deal, as they too would feel themselves expendable.
The ignorance being displayed by the Trump administration is unbelievable. Not only does it represent a major breach in the United States' long military alliance with Europe, it threatens to topple the world order as we know it. Such a decommitment would make our Asian allies feel similarly threatened by China and Russia. While the top brass in the US military may complain, they are still answerable to the Commander-in-Chief. For whatever strange reason Trump has put his "trust" in Putin to negotiate a favorable peace deal.
No wonder, Lithuanians are literally digging in. For that matter, all Eastern Europeans. What began as a propitious new era in the late 1990s that saw Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary become part of NATO, with seven more Eastern European countries joining in 2004, has turned into a nightmare. No place is safe if Trump chooses to placate Putin. Not even Western Europe, which finds itself struggling with populist movements sympathetic to Putin.
Who would think the US would turn its back on Europe in favor of a Russian autocrat, who has been terrorizing Europe for the past 17 years? All this during his first month in office. What will the next 47 months bring?
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