By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Lithuania's prime minister, Gintautas Paluckas, told the BBC's Newsnight that his country is ready to fight back if attacked by Russia, but confirmed the government has evacuation plans in place regardless. Lithuanians, he said, feel constantly threatened by Moscow - a sentence that reads as understatement to anyone watching a map of the region.
The comments came as European intelligence officials, gathering informally around this week's UN General Assembly session in New York, warned that Russia's tolerance for risk is rising. Sabotage attacks and other covert operations aimed at states supporting Ukraine have intensified, according to a Guardian briefing, part of what officials describe as a hybrid or shadow war, deliberately calibrated to stay just below the line that would trigger a military response from NATO.
The pattern is by design, not accident: strikes and disruptions bothersome enough to hurt, quiet enough to argue about. That ambiguity is precisely the point, and precisely the problem for NATO members trying to decide when a response is warranted.
We have not independently verified the specific intelligence assessments referenced by European officials; the warning comes from unnamed intelligence chiefs relayed through British reporting, and readers should weigh it as an informed warning rather than a confirmed operational picture.
For a country of under three million people on NATO's eastern edge, the calculation is not abstract. Paluckas's readiness to fight back is one thing. The existence of evacuation plans is another, and it tells you which outcome Vilnius is actually preparing for.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC and The Guardian.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE -
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