United States President Donald Trump’s behavior at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) recent summit in Brussels (July 11–12) and in its aftermath has cast a shadow on this landmark event. Trump’s follow-up actions, including the meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, continued hitting... MORE

The governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania face an increasingly large espionage threat from the Russian Federation. Naturally, this threat includes the introduction or recruitment of Russian agents to engage in classical espionage activities like ferreting out classified information from government sources. But it is... MORE

The Second Investigation Department under the Ministry of National Defense published its annual report, the “National Threat Assessment 2018,” on March 26 (Vsd.lt, March 26). This year, Lithuania is celebrating its centenary of independence. And since during the last century, the country was only truly... MORE

Thanks to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well as its own efforts, Latvia almost certainly is protected against a Russian military threat of the kind some in Moscow constantly threaten the Baltic States with. Indeed, a new Estonian government report specifically concludes that... MORE

The biggest success for all three Baltic countries—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—last year was the arrival of the multinational battalion groups to the region, thus implementing the decisions reached at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 2016 summit in Warsaw (see EDM, February 23, 2017). Furthermore,... MORE

The joint strategic Russian-Belarusian military exercise Zapad 2017 (“West” 2017), which took place on September 14–20, is worth studying in detail because of what it reveals about Moscow’s likely military operations in the westward direction in the event of a regional crisis. At the same... MORE

The question of where to secure dependable energy supplies for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe was notably broached during United States President Donald Trump’s July visit to Poland. During his meeting with regional leaders in Warsaw, Trump stated that fast-growing US natural gas... MORE

Minsk is winning over Belarus’s neighbors. “We have stabilized our relations with Belarus… Today, there is no ideological war between our countries,” declared Witold Waszczykowski, the Polish minister of foreign affairs. This statement is impressive, particularly against the backdrop of Poland’s relations with Ukraine, which... MORE

In late June 2017, for the second time in the previous two months, Europe experienced a massive wave of cyberattacks, which also spread to the United States. Initially, the attacks—from a virus known as “Petya”—targeted Ukrainian and Russian companies, but then propagated to hit vulnerable... MORE

Rail Baltica, the European-standard-gauge railway project for the Baltic States, which also has important security implications (see EDM, October 19, 2016), is becoming a more important component of the future regional economy and security architecture. And now, Ukraine has expressed interest in joining this project... MORE