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In the spring of 2014, as Russia illegally annexed Crimea, my son Raimundas was completing a Russian language course in Moscow. Though he had been planning to continue on to a master’s program in England, when he finished the course he returned to Vilnius and joined the Lithuanian Armed Forces. He is a grandchild of deportees to the USSR’s Siberian gulag who were wounded by Russian special forces while supporting Lithuania’s partisan insurgency—which lasted until 1970s. I was proud of him for making the commitment. At the time, I was the European Union Ambassador to Russia, but I could not imagine Raimundas would ever have to put his training to use, defending our country from Russians. Now the calculus has changed. Today Russia invades Ukraine, tomorrow it could be the Baltics.
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As Lithuanians, we are reassured by the support of the United States and NATO. As George W. Bush said when we joined NATO: “Anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America.” In the seventy three-years of NATO’s existence, neither the Soviet Union nor Russia has dared to cross the red line. But our history, and the present moment, prove that we cannot be complacent—especially given our understanding of Vladimir Putin. Over the years, I’ve attended several summits and dinners with him and sometimes we chatted informally. Our exchanges were unremarkable. He was detail oriented and famously impressive in his knowledge of policy minutiae, especially regarding oil and gas: extraction sites, supply capacity, pipeline size, prices and so on. But it is clear at this point that his controlling attention to detail is hostage to violent delusions—not least imaginary Neo-Nazi oppression in Ukraine and his role as savior in a warped missionary tradition.
We had plenty of warning. In 2016, several people with a close, long-term, personal access to Vladimir Putin told me they were in a “fight for Putin’s mind.” Their…
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Source : time
