Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Christopher Smith told lawmakers at a hearing on threats to the Baltic States in mid-May that the US expects Russia to redirect some of its forces from Ukraine towards that front after the special operation ends. He also claimed that Russia is supposedly already waging hybrid warfare against those three countries and insisted that the US won’t abandon them nor NATO’s Eastern Flank in general. This fearmongering is driven by ulterior motives.
It was earlier assessed that “The EU Poses A Much More Credible Threat To Russia Than The Inverse”, and the magnum opus recently published by Deputy Chair of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev about the 1941-like threat posed by Germany’s remilitarization reaffirms this view. As regards the Baltic front of the New Cold War that Smith addressed in his hearing, not only does Germany already have a tank brigade in Lithuania like he mentioned, but it also aims to militarily dominate the EU as a whole.
This motive and the means to that end were elaborated on here, all of which naturally justifies Russia’s potential defensive repositioning of its conventional forces to this front once the Ukrainian Conflict ends. To make such a move even more compelling from the perspective of Russia’s legitimate national security interests, the UK announced that it’ll lead a new multinational naval initiative for containing Russia in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Ocean, which this analysis here argues are rapidly merging into a single front.
The growing threat of a naval blockade on Russia in the Baltic Sea, including specifically against its exclave of Kaliningrad in parallel with cutting off overland connectivity via Lithuania, justifies more muscular measures on Moscow’s part for deterrence. Smith is aware of the military-strategic dynamics that were described by dint of his elite policymaking position near the top of the State Department so his fearmongering is actually a dishonest reversal of reality for tightening Russia’s containment there.
Simply put, by falsely portraying Russia’s potential defensive repositioning of its conventional forces on the Baltic front as unprovoked aggression that implies an intent to launch a first strike against NATO, he’s accelerating the consolidation of regional anti-Russian containment forces there. The purpose is to imbue a false sense of urgency to the task of maximizing the threat that this regional coalition poses to Russia in the hopes that it’ll suffice for eventually blackmailing their adversary into future concessions.
As was explained here in late April, however, Russia will not allow that to happen and is instead expected to resort to nuclear means in the worst-case scenario for breaking whatever blockade NATO might one day try to impose upon it in the Baltic Sea (especially if this threatens to cut off Kaliningrad). This credible assessment exposes the supreme danger of NATO’s Baltic plans for tightening Russia’s containment along this front and suggests that it should be shelved to avoid World War III breaking out by miscalculation.
That might not happen unless/until Russia successfully pushes back against the Neo-Reagan Doctrine’s rolling back of its influence across the world over the past year. The spree of setbacks that Russia has experienced abroad since Trump returned to office, especially along its entire southern periphery due to the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity’s” dual military logistics role, have emboldened him to flirt with threatening Kaliningrad. He’ll only reconsider these plans once/if he’s taught a lesson.
