Regional security 'deteriorating', says Lithuania's president

Having recently called Wagner troops "serial killers", Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda calls for strengthened security on the Belarusian border. "As I understand, the plan of Lukashenko is to build the necessary infrastructure for 6,000 Wagner fighters. And then the most important question is what’s next?" Nausėda adds: "Nobody knows if it's possible to integrate those fighters again into the regular army of the Russian Federation because of the gap in salaries. So they might be used in Africa, they might be used to strengthen the Belarusian army."

In a worst-case scenario, Nausėda believes Wagner troops "can turn against us". That's why he says Lithuania has "a special plan, a cooperation between our armed forces and security border officials. We also will spend much more capacity collecting intelligence data on the border. And we are asking our colleagues and allies in NATO to give adequate attention to this fact during the Vilnius summit".

For Nausėda, Belarus represents an "explosive cocktail" of security threats. "You see a lot of aggressive rhetoric from Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko. You have this decision to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the Belarusian soil, which is already in the stage of implementation and there are a number of attempts to illegally cross the border. So this illegal, weaponised migration is going on."

Ahead of the July 2023 NATO Summit in Vilnius, Nausėda reaffirms that "the security situation in our region is not improving, it is not stable. It's deteriorating because of the reasons I mentioned, and of course this mutiny." To improve security in the Baltics, he hopes "regional plans will be approved by the Vilnius summit and will become executable by the end of this year."