Lithuania is quietly racing to fortify itself on a knife’s edge between Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave and the authoritarian Belarusian regime, and the urgency is real. Recent incursions — including drones crossing into Lithuanian airspace and explosive-laden wreckage found on Lithuanian soil — have driven home that Moscow’s harassment isn’t abstract theory but a present danger.
Ordinary citizens are being turned into defenders, reviving traditions of the Riflemen’s Union and bolstering a national habit of readiness that Western elites often mocked until it was necessary. These volunteer formations and civil-defense programs are not “paramilitary paranoia”; they are prudent, historically grounded preparations that any free nation would applaud.
What Lithuania faces is a new generation of low-cost, high-disruption hybrid attacks — from unmanned drones to smuggling balloons and likely sabotage — designed to terrorize and destabilize without crossing the threshold of full-scale war. This is the Kremlin’s playbook: small, deniable strikes to bleed resolve and fracture alliances, and Lithuania’s leaders are rightly calling them what they are.
Vilnius has responded with concrete spending and hard infrastructure: trenches, anti-tank defenses, mines, sensors and a multi-year plan to invest over a billion euros in deterrence and resiliency. That kind of seriousness should be the baseline expectation from every NATO ally — not a novelty to be negotiated away by bureaucrats in Brussels.
Allies are beginning to step up in tangible ways, with long-term deployments and brigade-level commitments from major European powers that signal resolve rather than bland statements. Those moves are welcome, but they must be matched by sustained political will and deterrent capabilities, not the wishful thinking that got Europe into strategic complacency for so long.
This moment exposes a broader failure of the Western establishment to take deterrence seriously until threats were knocking at the door. It’s a lesson in humility: liberty doesn’t survive on slogans and committees; it survives on readiness, credible force, and the willingness to defend what’s ours and what we promised to protect.
If the Western alliance is to honor its commitments, leaders must convert words into capabilities — air defenses, logistics prepositioning, and relentless support for partners who choose to defend themselves. Appeasement and hollow assurances only invite escalation; deterrence backed by action keeps the peace and preserves freedom.
