Twenty years after their accession to the European Union (EU) and NATO, the Baltic states are still better connected to Russia and Belarus through their railway infrastructure than to their Western allies.
Until that changes, the Baltics will be harder to reinforce in times of crisis and war. Already delayed by five years to 2030, the EU is rightly insisting there can be no further slippage in a project that forms an absolutely central role in defending the three countries from Russian attack.
Developed as part of the vast transport network of the Soviet Union, the current railways of the Baltic states were designed to link mainland Russia and the Baltic harbors of Klaipėda, Riga, and Tallinn. This east-west railway axis still dominates the logistical landscape.
The completion of Rail Baltica, an alternative 870km (540 miles) north-south railway link, has been postponed from 2025 to 2030 and is facing massive cost overruns. Current estimates suggest it will total €15.3bn ($16.7bn) by completion, mostly with EU funds. In January, the bloc announced further financial support from its Connecting Europe Facility, including €51m ($56m ) allocated to Latvia from its military mobility fund. About 150km of line is currently under construction.
The use of the fund, which backs dual-use civilian and military infrastructure projects, demonstrates the concern in Western capitals about the logistics for resupplying and reinforcing the Baltic states if they came under attack. An earlier tranche of money was provided by Brussels in the months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
When finalized, the new rail line will connect the Baltic capitals of Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn and — through Warsaw — provide a direct and much faster link to continental Europe.
In the meantime, the existing east-west interconnections remain hamstrung by technical limitations that bind the Baltic states to the east.
Along with the geography of the tracks, they also inherited the “Russian” 1520 mm railway gauge, and the trains in the Baltics keep rolling on these wide tracks. As most other European countries use the narrower gauge of 1435mm, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are operating railways incompatible with their EU and NATO partners.
The only direct railway link between the Baltic states and the West is a 123km (76 miles) long section of European gauge track between the Polish-Lithuanian border and the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, which was built as an earlier part of the Rail Baltica project.
All freight transported further than Kaunas has to be reloaded onto trains compatible with the wider gauge, making cross-border railway transportation time-consuming and expensive. It is one reason why the export of Ukrainian grain through the Lithuanian port of Klaipėda could not be established as a viable solution to Russia’s Black Sea blockade.
The wide railway gauge is also used in Belarus and Ukraine; officials in Kyiv are working under high pressure to establish interoperable railway links with its European partners and cut remaining ties with the invader.
Military mobility in the Baltic states is already complicated by their unfavorable geographic location between mainland Russia and Belarus in the east, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad to the west.
The potential aggressor already has multiple options for blocking access for incoming NATO forces, and infrastructure bottlenecks in the region make the situation even worse.
Transporting military equipment by ship is slow and would be vulnerable to Russian naval interdiction in the Baltic Sea, while the limited number of highways and inadequate load capacities of bridges would impede the transport of heavy military equipment by truck.
If they are interoperable with Poland and Germany, railways represent the best option for transporting armored vehicles and other heavy military equipment to the Baltics.
And, as all modes of transport have their limitations and are extremely vulnerable in times of war, a diversity of routes and modes would help secure the flow of reinforcements and military supplies.
Military logistics should also be considered in the broader context of time-sensitive defense planning during a crisis. In an interview with this author, Lieutenant General (ret.) Ben Hodges, the former Commanding General of US Army Europe, described the complexity of such tasks, including the ability to recognize the threat, make political and military decisions, and deploy NATO’s forces to the affected area.
Whereas the first two on Hodges’ list are difficult to control in advance, the third can and should be tackled during peacetime by removing existing infrastructure bottlenecks.
Unfortunately, the track record of the Baltic states in eliminating their transport isolation from the West has been poor for a number of reasons. There have been prolonged disagreements between capitals about the exact route of Rail Baltica, alongside financial limitations and some serious examples of project mismanagement.
Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Baltic states’ representatives also seemed to be interested in preserving the profitable east-west trade axis. For example, the Lithuanian bulk cargo terminal (BKT), specializing in handling fertilizers, was co-owned by Belaruskali, Belarus’ state-owned potash company.
The export of Belarusian potash via rail through the Lithuanian port of Klaipėda represents an important example of the effect restrictions can have. Banning access to Klaipėda for Belaruskali to punish Minsk for the violent crackdown on peaceful protesters and its co-aggression against Ukraine, has pushed some Lithuanian businesses to look for new opportunities on the north-south axis.
With Belarus increasingly re-routing its exports through Russia, this will likely have lasting effects on the trade landscape in the region and add to the pressure to speed up the Baltic states’ infrastructure integration with continental Europe.
Given the importance of the north-south railway axis for the Baltic states’ defense, the push for rapid progress in the implementation of Rail Baltica must come from the highest political level.
One year after the new regional defense plans were approved at the NATO summit in Vilnius, it is high time for the Baltic states and their NATO partners to explain how they are to be implemented under the conditions of war.
There is no way around it, the focus must shift to improving cross-border military logistics. And that means rail.
Dr. Justina Budginaite-Froehly is a researcher focusing on strategic security issues and geopolitics in the Baltic Sea region.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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