Mattis, in Lithuania visit, reaffirms NATO support
Ifa PABRADE, LITHUANIA — shooting war ever breaks out between Russia and the NATO alliance, it could well be in a place like Pabrade, a little town near the edge of a little nation. But a different sort of conflict, waged with bytes rather than bullets, is already being fought here.
Jim Mattis, the U.S. secretary of defense, visited this Lithuanian town on Wednesday to see how NATO is faring in that fight, and his guide was a German officer who has been a target in that war, falsely accused of being a rapist and a Russian spy.
Part of Mattis’ reason for visiting the Baltic region was to reassure allies who were rattled when President Donald Trump said the NATO alliance was “obsolete” and suggested that the United States might only protect countries that had “fulfilled their obligations to us.”
Standing with President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania at the presidential palace on Wednesday, Mattis said, “Have no doubt that we stand with you united in a common cause.”
In his visit to Pabrade, Mattis walked past camouflaged tanks as soldiers with greenpainted faces stood at attention. “What’s the spirit of your troops?” Mattis asked.
He was assured by his guide, Lt. Col. Christoph Huber, commander of the German battalion that recently took up station here, that morale could not be higher.
Huber and his soldiers have been the subjects of two recent cyberattacks: false claims of wrongdoing that officials believe were put in circulation by an increasingly aggressive Russian intelligence operation that is meant to sow doubts and resentment of NATO’s growing presence in the Baltics.
The first attack came on Feb. 14. Emails sent to the president of the Lithuanian parliament and various local media outlets falsely claimed that German soldiers had raped a girl. The story rippled through the country before the police determined that it was untrue.
A few weeks later, another series of emails circulated with what seemed to be photos of Huber among a group of Russian partisans. The photos were faked.
Then, in early April, came a phony story about a supposed chemical assault on U.S. troops in nearby Estonia, which appeared mysteriously on a popular Lithuanian news site.
How did it feel to be the target of these attacks? Huber shrugged. “We don’t know for sure who was behind it,” he said, bundled up against an unseasonable spring snowfall that was blanketing the country. “But we take everything in the information environment quite seriously.”
Darius Jauniskis, director general of Lithuania’s intelligence agency, said that part of the country’s response to the incidents had been to openly discuss Russia’s efforts to undermine the NATO mission in the country.
“We cannot remain silent and say everything’s all right,” Jauniskis said in an interview in a windowless conference room in his agency’s headquarters in Vilnius, the capital. “We need to talk about that, so that the people and leaders know the threats are real.”
Jauniskis and other Baltic leaders have been warning their counterparts in the West for several years about the growing menace they saw from Russia. Their warnings were often dismissed as alarmist. But after the apparent Russian efforts to influence elections in the United States, France and elsewhere, no one needs convincing any more.
“We can’t be glad that we were right all along,” said Raimundas Karoblis, the Lithuanian defense minister. “It’s not always comfortable to remind people we’ve been telling them about the Russians for years.”