A ceasefire in Ukraine would be used by Moscow as an opportunity to rearm and redeploy forces to the north, raising the security threat to the Baltic states, defense ministers from Estonia and Lithuania have warned.
The senior political figures highlighted that Russian plans to deploy additional troops close to their borders while also rearming rapidly, the Financial Times wrote.
Estonia’s defense minister, Hanno Pevkur, told the paper Russia would redistribute its forces very quickly in the event of a truce in Ukraine and “that means also the threat level will increase significantly very quickly.”
Dovilė Šakalienė, Lithuania’s defense minister, said in London last week that Russia had plans beyond Ukraine, warning that “they already have a huge, battlefield-trained army, which is going to get even bigger.”
The FT reported that while the Trump administration continues to try to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, a full stop to the fighting remains a distant prospect.
However, “a halt in fighting would give Russia a chance to fulfil its 2022 plans to raise a 1.5mn strong army and add an entire new army corps in the north, doubling the number of troops near Finland and the Baltics,” the paper wrote.
Pevkur estimated that of the approximately 600,000 Russian soldiers believed to be in Ukraine, around half would probably be redeployed following any peace.
“These men will not go back to different parts of Russia to harvest the corn or do something else,” the minister said, adding wages are “five to 10” times higher in the military than in other sectors.
He also warned about relocating NATO troops from their current positions on the alliance’s eastern flank to police a peace agreement.
“We cannot fall into the trap that our forces are somehow fixed in Ukraine,” he told the newspaper. “Then we will have risks at our border.”
