Baltic Sea

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is right to focus on the security of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, its most exposed members. However, the idea that deterring Russia in the Baltics requires the deployment of...

The NATO summit of July 11-12, 2018 in Brussels has been causing waves, many of them unsurprisingly emanating outward from U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet, the summit resulted in meaningful steps to bolster Baltic defense. The most notable product...

Broken international agreements, historical cleavages, and Russia’s use of both hard and soft power in the Baltic states have caused some analysts to worry that another conflict in Eastern Europe awaits. Fearing that the Kremlin will launch a Crimea-style...

The Baltic states have felt themselves to be in something of a defense crisis since the Russian annexation of Crimea, which revealed Russia’s revisionist intentions to the extent that even Western Europeans began to take them seriously. While all...

It was a chilly spring afternoon in downtown Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Curious passersby crowded around a dozen or so American soldiers, who were displaying their military equipment. While a bit reserved at the beginning, soldiers became much...

On April 3, 2018, the three Baltic presidents—Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania, Raimonds Vejonis of Latvia, and Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia—will meet with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House. This unprecedented quadrilateral Baltic-U.S. presidential summit is the culmination...

“I was a KGB agent,” admitted one of Latvia’s most celebrated poets, Jānis Rokpelnis, in a December 2016 interview. “I confess because it is eating away at my conscience. . . . I have a feeling that I am...

In 1997, when Estonia first began building its digital society through an e-governance system to provide public services online, the general population had limited access to the internet. Twenty years later, the possibilities offered by digital technologies seem...

Since its inception in 2012, China’s “16+1” cooperation platform—an initiative aimed at intensifying Beijing’s economic and cultural ties with 16 countries in Central and Eastern Europe—has attracted great speculation about China’s motives and questions about the format’s concrete deliverables....

In a rural country school in Latgale, a region in eastern Latvia, breaks between classes are noisy with the sounds of students joking, laughing, and playing. In class, they speak Latvian, and in the hallways, they speak Latvian and...