Russia Planning Attacks on Infrastructure, Lithuanian President Says

Lithuania’s president has said his government has intelligence that Russia could be planning attacks on critical infrastructure, confirming media reports circulating in recent weeks that Poland and the Baltic states could be targeted.President Gitanas Nauseda said during an interview with the BNS news agency on July 15 that security has been tightened around transport and energy sites as a precaution.“I cannot deny that we have such information and that we are talking about kinetic operations, not large-scale, but nevertheless targeted kinetic operations, which, very likely, could be directed at critical infrastructure facilities,” he told BNS.Lithuanian intelligence did not know precisely which targets would be struck or when, only that there were such goals being planned, he said.Lithuania is a NATO member on the security union’s easternmost flank and shares a border with the Russian exclave Kaliningrad and Moscow’s ally, Belarus.Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Lithuania has increased its defense spending from 2.47 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 4 percent, making it second only to Poland, which spent 4.48 percent of GDP last year, based on NATO estimates.Moscow Alleges ‘Fearmongering’The Kremlin denied Nauseda’s allegations.“This is another wave of fearmongering aimed at continuing to brainwash people and prepare the population for further militarization,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to Russia’s state-run news agency TASS.Peskov accused Lithuania, along with the other Baltic states, of using the fear of an alleged Russian threat to bring more NATO forces to the region.“To do this, they need to create an image of an enemy in another country, in this case ours, and use this pretext, as we say, to continue deploying NATO military infrastructure in all its forms across the Baltic states,” the spokesman said.On July 5, Moscow denied media reports that it was plotting an attack on Poland—which, like the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, is in NATO—with Peskov calling them “horror stories.”On July 3, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that Warsaw was preparing extensively for a range of security scenarios, with Poland’s assessment informed by allied intelligence.NATO has said that Russia could launch a major assault on allied territory as early as ​2029 if its armament efforts persist. Moscow has denied having any such intentions.In February, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was not interested in launching a military assault on Europe but would retaliate if European forces attacked Russia.“And if Europe were to carry out its threats to prepare for war against us and launch an attack on the Russian Federation, [President Vladimir Putin] said that this would not be a special military operation on our part, but a full-scale military response using all available military means, in accordance with the relevant doctrinal documents,” Lavrov said at the time, according to TASS.NATO’s Eastern FlankNATO has sought to bolster the security of its eastern flank amid concerns of potential Russian aggression.Last month, the alliance officially assigned an additional headquarters to the Baltic region, to be overseen by a German-Dutch coalition.NATO troops in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and ​in northern Poland, have been under the command of the Multinational Corps North East, a multinational headquarters based in the northwestern Polish city of Szczecin.In May, the German and Dutch defense ministries announced that they would take command of a new, second multinational headquarters, under the 1 German-Netherlands Corps, based in Münster, Germany. It has assumed the command role specifically in the region of Estonia and Latvia.Further south, Bucharest said that it and its allies would be working on reinforcing air defenses along Romania’s portion of the eastern flank after a Russian drone strayed into its airspace in May, hitting a block of apartments and injuring two people.