PM doesn’t commit to permanent Baltic force
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 Krisjanis Karins: 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 said after meeting Karins. “And that is a conversation that we are having.”
Karins had gone into his closeddoor 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 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.
Before meeting Trudeau, Karins 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, and that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has changed all calculations.
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.
Karins 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 … in the first place.”
The Latvian prime minister specifically called for “division-level defence” in the Baltic countries that would include adding radars, anti-air and anti-missile defences and other capabilities. That would represent potentially thousands more troops across the region.
He also asked that the forces be made permanent. Canada’s mission was recently extended to March 2025 after several previous extensions. He said the move would send “a very clear signal to Moscow.”