By Juris Kaža
Riga, Jan 9 (EFE).- Russian-sponsored disruption of underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea will continue and escalate unless such activities are met with a firm response from NATO countries, Lithuania’s new Foreign Affairs Minister Kęstutis Budrys told journalists in the Latvian capital Riga on Thursday, noting that the arrival of NATO naval vessels in the region was a step towards such a response.
“We have to see it in a broader process of escalating from Russia’s side, so that’s what it was, and this is related to our to Ukraine, it’s related to overall Russia’s stance against the West, as they understand it, and our lack of response, and we have to have this clear link between lack of response to previous situations where we’re getting now, and lack of reaction to what was happening already in continental Europe and elsewhere with the kinetic sabotage operations from Russian institutions and their agents,” Budrys, a former advisor to Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda said.
Commenting on remarks by United States president-elect Donald Trump urging all NATO countries to spend 5 % of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, Budrys said: “When we’re talking about the percentage of GDP, Lithuania this year will reach almost 4 percent. And we’re looking forward to what we can build, what capabilities we can build and become stronger in this sense and provide more security to our people.”
He mentioned plans to build and equip an entire army division by 2030 as a capability-building project.
Asked about Trump’s comments that he would not rule out military force as a means to make Danish-controlled Greenland part of the US, Budrys did not mention Trump’s statement.
“We are allies. And what we do as allies is we talk and we discuss. We don’t fight each other,” Budrys said.
The Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Minister also noted that with the new Trump istration, “there will be other things as a priority of our common agenda. And one of them will be how to preserve international law and the international order, irrespective, in many, many areas.”
Welcoming Budrys on his first visit to Latvia, Latvia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Baiba Braže said she would not comment as Foreign Minister on Trump’s statements about annexing Canada and Greenland, noting that Danish and Canadian officials had expressed their views on these matters.
Regarding the disruption of subsea infrastructure, Braže said that changes to international laws and rules pertaining to the sea were needed in order to more effectively combat deliberate damage to communication and electrical cables.
“We also have to understand that international law needs to develop because there are conventions, there is a convention on the role of the sea, there is a tribunal, nothing has been tested, nothing has been sort of tried around these type of situations, so probably that is another venue that needs to be advanced in our t work, both within the region, but also within NATO,” Braže said.
Both Foreign ministers also referred to Belarus as a hostile neighbor to both of their countries.
Budrys called Belarus “a platform to threaten the neighbors and especially those that are in of the democratic movement of Belarus, mentioning the use of Belarus by Russian forces attacking Ukraine and the positioning of nuclear-capable missiles there.”
“From these geopolitical and strategic threats, we can go down to the very practical part, because we have seen and still see in both countries the threat of illegal migration or the organization of migration down to the activities of the Belarusian military. So there is a whole spectrum of threats, and many of them are instruments of Russia,” Budrys added. EFE
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