The 600-plus fortifications and other measures announced in January will spread across the Baltic states and will border both Russia and Belarus. The aim, a fundamental change in approach, will seek to channel any Russian invasion toward massive mobility hurdles in the form of bunkers likely stocked with reserves of mines, barbed wire, and materials for the construction of major anti-tank mobility traps such as dragon’s teeth.
Construction on the first bunkers is planned for 2025 and will cost at least an estimated €60m ($65m.)
The only military threat to the Baltic states, now as in centuries past, comes from Russian imperialist designs. The Russian despot’s predecessor and sidekick, Dmitry Medvedev, said on March 15 that Latvia does not exist, the same formulation the Kremlin uses for Ukraine. Western military planners have suggested they are taking the threat seriously.
NATO exercises have often gamed out how to defend or liberate the occupied Baltics, and policymakers have had deal with the threat of Russian gray zone or hybrid warfare attacks. Since last year’s Vilnius summit, the alliance has moved from a forward presence of a few battalions to forward defense, which aims to hold territory.
The old Baltic plan of total defense strategies, including mobilizing resistance among the civilian population, is no longer considered adequate. As Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas complained in summer 2022, the old plan allowed Russia to capture the Baltics and flatten their towns before (hopefully) NATO forces liberated whatever remained.
The defensive fortification line proves that all that once was old is new again; it puts the hinge of defensive success on preventing a conventional Russian offensive from breaking through, rather than bracing for some form of asymmetric conflict.
From a tactical perspective, this investment reflects the changes in the last 10 years of the Ukraine war. Russia’s seizure of Crimea spawned fears of similar operations conducted in NATO countries that might not provoke an Article Five response in time to defend the sovereignty of the invaded ally. While those sorts of operations still feature in the Russian playbook — and are being used against Estonia — the last two years of massive military operations show the need for major conventional defensive systems.
Well-supplied and tenaciously held defensive lines have been a crucial factor in the last 12 months of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Russian General Sergey Surovikin, after preserving forces from Ukraine’s 2022 Kharkiv offensive, devoted much of last winter to laying out a fortification line that now bears his name. Lacking the necessary armored or air support, the 2023 Ukrainian Donetsk-Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive could not break through. The initiative has shifted back to Russian forces, and now Ukraine is fortifying a 600-mile front.
Baltic military planners have grimly noted the costs Russia will pay for advances in Ukraine. Human wave tactics have led to hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties (for a total of more than 300,000 dead and wounded at the end of 2023), but no doubt army commanders attribute that to the successful capture of Bakhmut last May and Avdiivka in February. Russian air losses have also crept up as fighter-bombers fly riskier sorties to support advancing infantry.
There’s certainly an unsustainability to these Russian tactics at some point, but just as Ukraine can’t simply wait for Russia to be bled dry, the Baltic countries cannot put their independence, or the safety of their civilians and cities at risk, hoping to drag the war on through their heartland while waiting for NATO forces to intervene. Everyone is now clear about the terrible human costs of Russian occupation.
If Russia lunges at Estonia or tries to drive tanks from Belarus through Vilnius to connect with Kaliningrad, a NATO response would mean a conventional war that devastates the battlefront.
Ukraine offers daunting examples, from $1 trillion estimated cost of rebuilding to the generational project of making a country safe after it is littered with landmines and unexploded ordnance. Bracing for the inevitable use of bombers and long-range strikes on civilian targets like seen against many Ukrainian cities is a given. Even defeating a Russian invasion entails drastic human and economic costs to Baltic civilians. NATO munitions would have rain down on NATO members’ roads and fields and cities.
The Baltic Defense Line is a means of forcing as much of that destruction back onto Russian soil, and it restrains crossfire to a belt along the border already sacrificed for defensive depth.
In this way, dedicated, permanent defensive structures are a deterrent investment that broadcasts collective Baltic commitment to give no ground. The Russian determination to dig in and hold occupied territory stymied the 2023 counteroffensive, and that defensive position has encouraged some Western intellectuals — the so-called realists — to mistakenly argue for peace talks based on the illusion of limited Russian goals.
The Baltic states, better versed in Russian history and Kremlin ruthlessness, cannot risk putting themselves in that situation. Russia must be fought from the first mile.
Michael C. DiCianna is a research assistant with the Yorktown Institute. He has worked as a consultant in the US intelligence community for several years, focusing on military affairs in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.”
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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