Dispatch from the Kaliningrad border: Russia is fighting a long battle of attrition with the West

[Celerity]

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/dispatch-from-the-kaliningrad-border-russia-is-fighting-a-long-battle-of-attrition-with-the-west/



PANEMUNĖ, Lithuania—Standing at a border checkpoint between Lithuania and Kaliningrad on an unseasonably warm spring day, I can see the Russian “Z” for victory emblazoned on a building just across the Neman River. In defiant response, oversized Lithuanian and Ukrainian flags fly on the Lithuanian side atop an old tower in an otherwise empty field. Most days are quiet at the crossing, border guards tell me. Motor traffic was closed on the bridge after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The checkpoint primarily serves pedestrians moving back and forth to see family. But the guards know intuitively that things could change at any moment with Russia, as they have many times before. Today, Lithuanians see a Russia that is in it for the long haul in a battle of attrition with the West. They see a Russia whose society and economy are adjusting in real time to a program of redoubled military recapitalization, endemic economic hardship, and the loss of a generation of young men killed or injured fighting against Ukraine.



Similarly, at the 422-mile border between Belarus and Lithuania, the Lithuanian government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to fortify the frontier against a range of threats. The Lithuanians view the Belarusian border as an extension of Russia’s campaign of low-grade aggression against the Baltic states, which Moscow is carrying out at the same time it works to shrink Belarusian sovereignty and agency.

The border with Belarus is a hive of activity. Lithuanian border guards battle cigarette smuggling via air balloons, incursions by drones, and waves of migrants attempting to cross into Lithuania. It is hard to know what is simple criminal activity, what are actions directed by Minsk to test Lithuania’s security, and what are both. The effect is the same—nonstop heat on Lithuania along most of its southern and eastern borders.



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[Igel]

1. They know what Russian occupation is like.

And it's not like they were taken merely as a result of taking back occupied territory from the Nazis.

No. Russia and Germany partitioned Poland. Then, because the Baltics didn't let Russia have access to their ports and the Baltic that Stalin claimed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had a, to use modern-speak, a "legitimate interest in," they just took over the territory.

Some countries in the West meekly protested. The US referred to them as "occupied countries." In the '50s there was even a commemorative series of "occupied nations" stamps (which, oddly, I had when I was a kid but can't find reference to on the Internet).

Later, a president referred to them as occupied and there was a wave of indignant protest from the opposing party. I found that protest to be embarrassingly in the tank for the Union of Socialist Republics. (I call the USSR's government "socialist", because that's what they called themselves.)

It doesn't help that there's a huge amount of Russian-language literature that treats the Baltics as Russian. Even Radishchev's "Puteshestviya" features Narva prominently at one point--and that's just across the Russian border with Estonia. A member of my diss committee was exiled to Tartu--less than 50 miles from Pskov.