The ‘next Ukraine’:
TO FIND Lithuania’s second army, you have to travel down an unmarked dirt track on the outskirts of the capital Vilnius.
Here, on the edge of one of the city’s arterial ringroads, is a series of utilitarian and drab squat buildings; shooting ranges left over from the Soviet era.
There are dozens of these military installations dotted through the country, a throwback to when Lithuania was the front line of defence for Moscow in the Cold War. But this base is now home to the Union of Riflemen, an 8,000-strong militia that is preparing to go to war against, rather than for, Russia.
The Union of Riflemen is a civilian defence force made up of Lithuanian volunteers drawn from all walks of life; businessmen, farmers, computer engineers. Even Remigijus Simasius, the current mayor of Vilnius, is a member. It would be easy to dismiss them as delusional weekend warriors, but one look at their high-velocity automatic weapons and the masked instructors from the Lithuanian army tells you that they are deadly serious about what many of them believe is a coming confrontation with Vladimir Putin.
Liudas Gumbinas, a midlevel manager in the Lithuanian offices of a multinational company, said membership of the corps was growing fast. “Since the crisis in Ukraine we’ve had an increase of 1,000 new members over the last year, making the total membership of the Union around 8,000 across Lithuania. What is more, it is becoming very popular with young people, and we expect numbers to rise,” he added.
The Union was formed in 1919 as a civil defence force but was outlawed during the Soviet era. It reformed in 1989 just as Lithuania was starting its battle for independence. It now forms part of the Lithuanian government’s strategy to prepare its tiny population of around three million for what feels like a very real Russian threat.
Earlier this month, parliament voted overwhelmingly to reintroduce conscription, which was abolished in 2008. The plan is to draft up to 3,500 young men aged 19 to 26 for nine months of service every year, boosting Lithuania’s armed forces from 18,500 to 22,000.
At the beginning of the year, the government also published a 100-page pamphlet which it distributed throughout the country.
Awkwardly titled, “What we need to know in Extreme Situations and in Instances of War”, it can best be described as a sort of self-help manual for Lithuanian citizens facing invasion and occuption.
It does not mention Russia by name, but it doesn’t need to. It is nakedly intended as a means of helping the country to avoid the fate of Ukraine. It has been widely circulated in libraries, universities, schools and online and is full of helpful suggestions about what to do if you hear gunfire outside your home and how to undermine a foreign occupation of Lithuania by continuing to do your job, but badly and inefficiently.
Although Lithuania has no border with mainland Russia, a three-hour drive from Vilnius takes you to a Russian exclave that sits menacingly on the country’s Baltic coastline: Kaliningrad.
This is the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic fleet, one of the most important in its navy, on a strip of land that Moscow insisted on retaining after the Second World War.
As well as tens of thousands of Russian troops, there are missiles stationed there capable of carrying nuclear warheads. This month a Nato patrol intercepted Russian fighter jets off Lithuania’s Baltic coast as Moscow marked its effective takeover of Crimea by staging a military drill involving war planes, submarines and more than 45,000 troops. The planes were flying from Russia to Kaliningrad.
Sigitas Samborskis, a Lithuanian who grew up in Kaliningrad and was a leader campaigning for the rights of the Lithuanian community there, has had to flee the exclave. “Right now, it’s dangerous,” he said, a few hundred feet from the border with Kaliningrad. “They started arresting people. When you try to enter the border they might hold you for 48 hours and start provoking you in other ways. What can I do?”
Ramune Ramanskuiae, the editor of a Lithuanian newspaper based near the border with the exclave, said that in many ways a silent war had aleady started between Russia and Lithuania; an information war. She and her team of reporters were recently offered substantial bribes to print articles friendly to Russia. Instead, they are about to print an investigative article about it.
“We were asked to report that if we had friendly relations with Russia, Lithuania’s economy and quality of life would be better,” she said. “And that if we did not keep friendly relations, Lithuania would be forced to rely on grants from Brussels and we would have a grim future.”
Lithuania is no stranger to being a victim of the aspirations of larger regional powers. High above Vilnius, with commanding views of the Lithuanian capital, sits the nation’s landmark, Gediminas’s Castle. It tells you much about Lithuania’s tortured past that its national symbol is a defensive fortification which has withstood attacks from the Crusaders and a war with Moscow back in 1655.
This year, the small nation is marking the 25th anniversary of independence from Soviet occupation.
Many senior Lithuanian politicians were young men and women at the time of the independence struggle in 1990, and remember all too well Russia’s economic blockade of Baltic states.
Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian president, described Russia as “a country that is not only threatening its neighbours but is also organising a war against its neighbours … it is the same international terrorism as we have in Iraq and Syria.” When asked to clarify whether she saw Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Russia as equals, she said: “Yes. I think that Russia is terrorising its neighbours and using terrorist methods.” Rageh Omaar is International Affairs Editor, ITV News. His report for On Assignment airs Tuesday, 10.40pm on ITV.
'Russia is not only threatening its neighbours it is organising a war'