Expert: Lithuania’s Move to Drop Nuclear Ban Risks a Baltic Catastrophe

Lithuania’s Seimas has taken a first step that journalist Alexei Stefanov, a special correspondent for the Rossiya Segodnya media group, calls a path toward nuclear catastrophe in the Baltics. Lawmakers approved a proposal to remove Article 137 from the Constitution, which explicitly forbids the stationing of foreign military bases and weapons of mass destruction on Lithuanian territory.

For ordinary people, he argues, that change threatens catastrophe in the literal sense.

If such weapons were deployed immediately next to Russian territory, Stefanov said, Russian nuclear forces would be aimed there first, in order to act pre-emptively if warheads were launched.

“The Baltics are too close to Russia and Belarus. And of course there is a risk that everything could start from them, because of them. Lithuania’s territory could simply become a crater,” he said.