Could Putin Take the Baltics?

Ted Vician 

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Lawrence Freedman quotes this statement from Putin, taken from an article in the Daily Telegraph, in his 2014 Survival article. This assessment was confirmed for Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn (the capitals of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, respectively, collectively known as the Baltic States) by wargames conducted by RAND in 2014 and 2015. The Wargame estimated it would take no more than 60 hours to reach one or more of the Baltic States’ capitals with a large combined-arms mechanized invasion force. However, that should be re-evaluated given the Russian Army’s poor performance in Ukraine since 2022. Russia’s full-scale combined arms invasion has spent three years mostly bogged down in eastern Ukraine.

Even so, the Russians did successfully seize Crimea in 2014 and continue to hold it (as of 2025), though they have not been able to take most of Ukraine, including Kyiv. The major difference is that Crimea is small and easily isolated, and Ukraine is large (more than 20 times larger in both land area and population) and connected to the rest of Europe. The seizure of Crimea was done by Russian special forces and proxies through a combination of infiltration, isolation, and information. 

not by a large military invasion. This is a threat that the Baltic States need to be concerned with, perhaps more so than an invasion (though Shlapak and Johnson’s RAND study indicates the importance of that threat and makes recommendations to reduce it). Since those nations are NATO allies, it should be a concern for the United States of America (USA) as well. Analysis The three Baltic States are small nations that border Russia – Latvia and Lithuania also border on Belarus, Russia’s ally. They are NATO members, so a military invasion could trigger NATO’s Article V defense clause. 

But what about an internal uprising? How would NATO allies react to protests from Russian-speaking citizens within those countries, possibly including violent ones? This would parallel the Russian efforts in Crimea and other parts of eastern Ukraine. Based on the data, each Baltic state is closer in size and population to Crimea than to Ukraine as a whole or Poland (presented for comparison due to its proximity to the Baltics and similarity in size and population with Ukraine). In particular, Estonia and Latvia have large Russian speaking minorities while Lithuania’s is smaller but sizable. Protecting such groups is a pretense that the Russian government has used in Ukraine, Georgia in 2008.