Russia’s advantage as an attacker is that it can easily organise small sabotages that the West finds hard to predict, Latvian National Armed Forces Commander Kaspars Pudāns told LETA agency.
At the beginning of October, Estonia temporarily closed traffic along the so-called Saatse Boot on its eastern border because border guards observed unusually large troop movements on the Russian side. The “Saatse boot” is a protrusion of Russian territory that extends into Estonia’s Võru county. A kilometre-long stretch of road cutting through it is used by Estonians to avoid a detour. Estonia published a video showing seven armed men standing on the road.
Commenting on the situation, Pudāns told LETA that on the one hand Russia had not violated anything because the armed people were on Russian territory. At the same time, the situation can be considered a certain provocation because it differs from everyday occurrences.
“If this is an intentional provocation, then they [Russia] have achieved their goal. Seven people on their side of the border cause almost an alarm all the way to NATO level. That is not correct. If we ‘set fire’ to our attention like this, we may fail to notice what we really need to notice. What do they achieve? We would start to react to every small such incident, even not an actual crossing, with NATO Article 4? That would devalue the essence of that Article, and Russia might be pleased that with a small input they achieve a large effect and we really emphasise the wrong direction,” the NAF commander said.
At the same time Pudāns stressed that
action plans have been developed for situations where an unidentified group of people appears on Latvia’s border side.
The commander also referred to a provision in the National Security Law that says a situation endangering the state caused by military actions is an unlawful foreign military action against Latvia, including the unlawful entry or presence of military formations or formations without identifying insignia on Latvian territory.
Pudāns also reminded that for the fourth year Latvia has been facing pressure of organised illegal immigration at the Latvia-Belarus border carried out by Belarus, and there have been cases where armed Belarusian service representatives were visible on the other side of the border.
“Our plan is to continue observing them in order to understand what their objectives are,”
he added.
Asked what scenarios Russia might unfold in the foreseeable future, given the ongoing war in Ukraine and the hybrid threat Russia poses to the West, Pudāns replied that Latvian services regularly analyse situations observed so far both at the Baltic borders and elsewhere in the world in order to be able to anticipate what possible next scenarios might be.
At the same time Pudāns did not deny that Russia’s advantage as an attacker is to find some new way we did not anticipate, and that small sabotages are hard to predict but easy to organise.
“Drones, cyberspace, the information space are places where such activities can easily be carried out. That in turn creates a large resonance on our side. Perhaps the aim is not so much to test our response procedures as to alarm and terrorise our society, and thereby we may lose public support and the public, for example, might not support a larger defence-sector budget,” the NAF commander explained.
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