Baltic leaders say the world has finally woken up to the admonitions they have been making for years: that Putin is prepared to use force, like he did in Georgia, Crimea and eastern Ukraine, to advance his political goals.
The NATO reinforcements come after years in which Baltic officials say their fears were dismissed by much of Europe as paranoia or some kind of post-Soviet stress disorder. Even after Russia launched the first state-on-state cyberattack in 2007, a digital assault on Estonia over its decision to relocate a Soviet-era monument, NATO’s military planners moved slowly, drawing up detailed defense plans for the region only after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
A large portion of the region’s population remembers the Soviet occupation, which ended in 1991. During the decades of Soviet rule, the Kremlin lured ethnic Russians to the Baltics by giving them better jobs and better housing than what was available to local residents, the most rebellious of whom were sent to prison camps in Siberia.
While Baltic nations want to support Ukraine, officials also feel constrained in the military aid they can supply to Ukraine, mindful of the need to keep weaponry in reserve in case they need it themselves.More than a frontal attack on NATO, some officials worry about the possibility that Putin could launch a smaller maneuver to show that NATO is weak — for example, seizing an island off the coast of Estonia — or renew hybrid warfare, like the cyberattacks that struck Estonia in 2007.
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