By CEPA In the summer of 2017 the Center for European Policy Analysis sent Colin Dueck on a listening tour of the Baltics to interview diplomatic, military and economic government officials in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on the subject of Russia’s long-term challenge to these countries, their national responses and related NATO and U.S. policies. He reports back that winter is coming and the Baltic states, as well as the United States,…
By Marta Kepe and Jan Osburg, for Small Wars Journal Total Defense: How the Baltic States Are Integrating Citizenry Into Their National Security Strategies Marta Kepe and Jan Osburg Russian aggression in Ukraine and military exercises at the borders of the Baltic states, as well as a string of information and cyber operations, have raised fears among Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania about their security. Due to their shared borders with Russia, the Baltic…
Pro-Kremlin media plays with the idea of civil war in Latvia By Mārtiņš Kaprāns, for CEPA On 5 July, the pro-Kremlin news portal Vesti.lv published an article by Vladimir Linderman, an outspoken pro-Kremlin Latvian activist, about local Russian-speakers’ insecurities; the article alluded to a possible civil war in the country. Linderman, whom Vesti.lv introduces as a political scientist—although he is not—stated that the Latvian government plans to make Latvian the…
By Edward Lucas, for CEPA War is never two dimensional. Edward Lucas considers one chapter of anti-Soviet resistance. Russia is fuming about a new NATO video celebrating the “Forest Brothers’” anti-Soviet resistance in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Outsiders mostly find this baffling. The guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation in the Baltics is not even a forgotten conflict; most people never knew about it in the first place. To get…
By East Stratcom We rarely see such a swift and aggressive reaction to a single video. But the Russian communication outburst to a recent eight-minute movie on YouTube was as immediate as it was foul-mouthed. The trigger was a NATO video about the so-called “Forest Brothers” – irregular units in the three Baltic states who fought against the Soviet occupying forces during and after World War II. NATO has produced…
By The Moscow Times Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, has lashed out at a new film produced by NATO that documents anti-Soviet resistance in the Baltic States after World War II. “This movement was created on the basis of fascist remnants who collaborated with German occupational authorities,” Zakharova wrote on Facebook. The partisan groups “carried out more than 3,000 acts of sabotage, the victims of which were thousands of…
By Urve Eslas, for CEPA A Russian propaganda website has turned a local joke about the Estonian-Russian border fence into an anti-NATO narrative directed at Estonia’s ethnic Russians. After an 11 May TV news broadcast showed Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid visiting the Estonian-Russian boundary, a few social media users shared observations about the border fence. Some noted that the barrier’s upper metal brackets were turned not towards Russian, but Estonian…
Written by Inga Spriņģe, Re:Baltica Who is polluting the Baltic internet in Russian? U.S. President Donald Trump has decided to end financing for the Baltic states. This screaming headline was published in March 2017 by the website rubaltic.ru which resembles a news portal and operates under the auspices of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, Russia. The task was to create the impression that the U.S., which is…
By Inga Spriņģe, Sanita Jemberga, Re:Baltica Three Baltic Russian-language news sites known collectively as Baltnews are secretly linked to the Kremlin’s global propaganda network. Three years ago, the Kremlin decided to power up its propaganda efforts and created Sputnik News, a younger brother to the globally-known TV channel RT. The new multimedia news agency opened offices around the world, including in the three Baltic capitals. Meanwhile, another news portal for…
Compiled by Liga Rudzite, TOL News agencies in Estonia and Latvia cease their cooperation with the Baltic branches of Russian government-controlled news agency. In this day of collapsing revenues for many media, it’s not often one hears of an outlet refusing to sell its services to a client. But that’s what happened this week in not one, but two Baltic countries. On 1 March, Sputnik Estonia reported receiving a letter…
