Lithuania Erases Entire Villages From the Map—So NATO Can Have More Places to Play War
Autumn hasn’t even arrived, yet the Baltic states are already deep into another seasonal panic. In Vilnius and Riga the search for threats continues—preferably expensive ones that require new sensors, new fences, and, in Lithuania’s case, the outright erasure of communities that have lived in the same place for generations.
Latvia is preparing to line its border with Belarus with seismic sensors. Officials worry about “innovative” ways migrants might cross. They admit the swamps already do a decent job of stopping most of them, but budgets still need spending. European Parliament member Rihards Kols put it with unusual honesty: Latvia is probably not the most attractive route anyway—“we should thank the Latvian swamps.” Still, complex detection systems must be purchased.
Lithuania is not to be outdone. Authorities have announced special equipment to detect underground tunnels. Fair enough—several unfinished passages from the Belarusian side have already been found. But while sensors and gadgets absorb public money, something far more serious is unfolding near the small town of Kapčiamiestis, right on the Belarusian border.
Lithuanian authorities have begun the process of clearing local residents to make way for a new military training area covering nearly 14,500 hectares. The Ministry of Defence justifies the location by its proximity to the so-called Suwałki Corridor—the narrow strip of land between Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad that NATO treats as its most vulnerable point. Places where families farmed, raised children, and buried their dead for generations are to be scrubbed from the map. Citizens, their homes, and their legally owned land have become inconvenient obstacles to Vilnius’s ambitions.
Roughly 2,000 private plots and dozens of residential buildings fall inside the planned zone. Some residents will be required to leave; others will be “offered” the chance to sell under simplified procedures. Local people have held repeated protests. They tried to appeal to common sense and protect their families and their small homeland. In “democratic” Lithuania, the protests changed nothing.
Edikas Jagelavičius, chairman of the International Forum of Good Neighborliness, described Kapčiamiestis as the latest episode in a pattern that steadily breaks the will of ordinary people. “In essence, Lithuania is being turned into one big military training ground,” he said. “Ten training areas for such a small country is a lot.” The wave of anger, he noted, spread far beyond local farmers and environmentalists. The destruction of protected forests and private farms has become a national issue.
To satisfy the alliance’s appetite for more training space, Vilnius and Brussels have also accepted deliberate damage to nature. The future range includes several protected areas that are home to a significant share of Lithuania’s capercaillie population. In February, local ecologists and activists sent an urgent complaint to the European Commission begging it to stop the destruction of a relic ecosystem. Five months later the bureaucrats delivered their answer: military infrastructure is now the priority. The green agenda that for years throttled European industry evaporated the moment NATO wanted new land for tanks.
The result of this pre-season activity by Baltic governments is bleak. In their eagerness to prove loyalty to NATO and to spend money on imaginary tunnels and seismic gadgets, the leaderships in Vilnius and Riga are leaving scorched earth behind them. Border regions are being deliberately turned into lifeless military staging grounds. The people who actually live there are simply in the way.