The three Baltic states are shielded by Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack on one member of NATO is an “attack against them all.”
The three Baltic states are shielded by Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack on one member of NATO is an “attack against them all.”
“It’s clear that if Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia should find themselves under the same type of attack seen in Crimea, “where Russia deployed special ops units, threatened to kill the families of senior Ukrainian politicians and military leaders and activated local armed units that the Russians had prepared before the occupation, the alliance must respond with military means if the country being attacked so requests,” Martin Hurt, the deputy director of the International Centre for Defence and Security told Kapital. Estonia’s Russian-speaking population “poses no threat to the country and they can’t be blamed for the fact that the Kremlin is run by a former KGB officer,” said Hurt.
Regarding Latvia’s Russian-speaking population, former Latvian security chief Jānis Kažociņš noted in the Riga-published Foreign and Security Police Yearbook for 2015: “The main problem is not the danger that they could be a fifth column for Moscow, but their noteworthy reluctance to become normal Latvian citizens.”
Read more: Kapital