Baltic Sea

The US, with NATO, routinely conducts military exercises all over Europe, especially since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 — exercises Russia inevitably condemns as destabilizing. The Defender Europe-20 exercise had just begun garnering increased attention in Western...

Russia, to a smaller or larger extent, has deliberately challenged the Baltic states on both domestic and international levels since the breakup of the Soviet Union. After Russia began an unannounced war against Ukraine and occupied and annexed Crimea...

Jimmy Fallon’s Justin Trudeau swaggered into the NATO cafeteria with Paul Rudd’s Emmanuel Macron with the same pomp as any high school heartthrobs in Saturday Night Live’s cold open December 7. The NBC sketch show picked up on some...

Narva, Estonia, is a city of contrasts and constant concern. Estonia’s third largest city, Narva is predominantly home to ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, including many Russian citizens and stateless residents. The country’s rich oil shale region and part of...

Another year, another Riga Conference, where leading experts in security and international affairs join with ministers and civil servants to reflect on a wide array of topics ranging from Baltic defense to Russia and the West. This year, the...

Dainius Vaičekonis was a university student in 1989 when he got in a taxi on Aug. 23 to drive through heavy traffic to the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania. It was a day that would change his life, and the...

Since joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) in 2004, Estonia has been an exemplar of rationality and democratic values, becoming the epitome of digital innovation, openness, and budgetary balance. This can be exemplified...

On April 4, shortly before midnight, the Latvian government announced its decision to remove Nils Ušakovs, the longtime mayor of Riga from his position. According to Minister for Environmental Protection and Regional Development Juris Pūce of the liberal Development/For!...

In the Baltics, the first half of 2019 is election time: for Estonia, it’s a new parliament, for Latvia and Lithuania, it’s new presidents; and then all three countries will vote for their new representatives to the European Parliament....

On March 20-22, 2019, a new annual Baltic security conference was inaugurated: the Vilnius Security Forum. It joined the ranks of security conferences already held in Estonia and Latvia—the Lennart Meri Conference, the Annual Baltic Conference on Defense, and...