Trudeau pledges more troops to Latvia
• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emerged from a private huddle with his Latvian counterpart on Thursday with a promise to bolster Canada’s military presence by deploying more Canadian Armed Forces officers to the Baltic state.
Trudeau did not, however, grant the top request from Latvian Prime Minister Arturs Arturs KrišjƗnis KariƼš: throwing Canada’s clear support behind calls for dramatically expanded and permanent NATO forces in Latvia and fellow Baltic states Lithuania and Estonia.
“We do have to reassess the risk posture and how much we need to stand together against potential Russian incursions and aggression,” Trudeau told reporters following his meeting with KariƼš. “And that is a conversation that we are having.”
KariƼš had gone into his closed-door meeting with Trudeau hoping to press the need for a dramatically enhanced military presence in the Baltics to counter any Russian perceptions of NATO weakness in the area.
Canada currently has nearly 700 troops leading a NATO battlegroup in Latvia, one of four such forces in the Baltics and Poland created in 2016 to deter and slow any Russian attack. The alliance is planning four more in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia
In an interview with The Canadian Press ahead of his meeting with Trudeau, KariƼš said the Canadians are performing admirably alongside counterparts from nine other alliance members, and that his country is grateful for their presence.
Yet he argued the Canadian-led battlegroup in his country, as well as those in Lithuania and Estonia, were created in a different context, when war with Russia seemed an unlikely scenario.
The battlegroups have been billed as “tripwires,” with the aim of making the Kremlin think twice before launching an attack as doing so would bring a unified response from the whole of the 30-member NATO military alliance.
KariƼš appeared to agree with experts who have long warned that these tripwires are more like speed bumps that would do little to stop Russia from rolling through the Baltics before NATO can respond, a situation that he says is now unacceptable.
“What we see in Ukraine, and the way Russia is waging war ... means that this strategy needs to be adjusted,” he said.
“Where the Russian military goes, not only is civilian infrastructure destroyed, but civilians are shot, maimed, murdered, raped, tortured, deported, killed. That means we need to have a more robust position in the Baltics to prevent an attack from occurring in the first place.”
KariƼš and his counterparts from neighbouring Estonia and Lithuania have since called for NATO to dramatically increase the size and capabilities of the battlegroups in their three countries by adding more troops and equipment.