Talking Europe discusses European security with Gitanas Naus?da, the president of Lithuania. Ahead of next month’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Naus?da urges a collective response to likely Wagner troop movements in Belarus. He also highlights the deployment of a permanent “full-fledged German brigade” in Lithuania and promotes a gradual approach towards European strategic autonomy.
Having recently called Wagner troops “serial killers”, Lithuanian President Gitanas Naus?da calls for strengthened security on the Belarusian border. “As I understand, the plan of Lukashenko is to build the necessary infrastructure for 6,000 Wagner fighters. And then the most important question is what’s next?” Naus?da adds: “Nobody knows if it’s possible to integrate those fighters again into the regular army of the Russian Federation because of the gap in salaries. So they might be used in Africa, they might be used to strengthen the Belarusian army.”
In a worst-case scenario, Naus?da believes Wagner troops “can turn against us”. That’s why he says Lithuania has “a special plan, a cooperation between our armed forces and security border officials. We also will spend much more capacity collecting intelligence data on the border. And we are asking our colleagues and allies in NATO to give adequate attention to this fact during the Vilnius summit”.
For Naus?da, Belarus represents an “explosive cocktail” of security threats. “You see a lot of aggressive rhetoric from Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko. You have this decision to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the Belarusian soil, which is already in the stage of implementation and there are a number of attempts to illegally cross the border. So this illegal, weaponised migration is going on.”
Ahead of the July 2023 NATO Summit in Vilnius, Naus?da reaffirms that “the security situation in our region is not improving, it is not stable. It’s deteriorating because of the reasons I mentioned, and of course this mutiny.” To improve security in the Baltics, he hopes “regional plans will be approved by the Vilnius summit and will become executable by the end of this year.”
“Germany decided to deploy a full-fledged German brigade [to Lithuania] on a permanent basis,” Naus?da underlines. This plan will take two to three years to implement, he explains, given that “there is infrastructure needed, there are training ranges needed, and we are speeding up the procedures to be able to finalise the job by 2026”.
On the issue of NATO expansion, he says: “We welcome the participation and membership of Finland. We still believe that it is possible to get Sweden at the table in the Vilnius summit, but of course the probability is not very high.” As for Ukraine‘s potential addition to NATO, Naus?da says: “President Zelensky told me that they understand that the situation does not allow us to invite Ukraine to become a full-fledged member of NATO right now. But they would like to see the corridor or procedural algorithm of how to do it once the war is over.”
Finally, on European strategic autonomy, Naus?da argues that “a step-by-step, gradual approach is suitable. The European peace facility is a good example of such autonomy or initiative. And also the training mission of Europe is very helpful in this regard. If we start with this, then we will continue the discussion and probably at the end of the day we will have larger projects in front of us.”
Programme prepared by Perrine Desplats, Sophie Samaille, Luke Brown, Isabelle Romero and David Pinto