Russia's NATO neighbors are building hundreds of bunkers and anti-tank ditches in case of an invasion
- Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia recently agreed to build massive fortifications on their borders with Russia and Belarus.
- Estonia alone plans to spend $65 million on more than 600 bunkers at the border.
Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia are busy building massive defensive installations along their collective 1,000 miles of border with Russia and Belarus.
The Baltic Defense Line, comprising hundreds of bunkers and other defensive measures, was a key part of an agreement struck between the three countries last month, prompted by the war in nearby Ukraine.
For its part, Estonia plans to build 600 bunkers, at a cost of $65 million, along the 183-mile border it shares with Russia, the country's state broadcaster ERR reported.
The defenses will consist of bunkers, support points, and distribution lines in peacetime, Hanno Pevkur, Estonia's defense minister, said. But in the event of hostilities, local reserves will be readied to deploy mines, anti-tank ditches, barbed wire, and dragon's teeth — concrete pyramids designed to stymie tanks — the Times of London reported this week.
"A Baltic defensive line is a huge project," Lukas Milevski, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote recently.
He added that the Baltic states "believe that they cannot give up ground, which means recognizing that they need to be prepared to contest a Russian invasion from the first moments following the violation of Baltic borders."
Major Donatas Palavenis, a research fellow at the Baltic Institute of Advanced Technology, told the Times that the defenses aim to funnel an enemy into an advantageous position for defenders.
A diagram of prototype bunkers published by Estonia's defense ministry shows how the oblong structures are designed to fit into a T-shaped dugout, their entrance protected by earthworks.
If the defenses seem familiar, it's because they are. They are a similar setup to Russia's so-called Surovikin Line, which effectively ground Ukraine's much-anticipated counteroffensive to a halt last summer.
"Building this fortified line will undoubtedly take time and resources, but its effectiveness is evident in the Ukraine war, where troops are not capable of effectively breaching obstacles and gaining substantial territory," Palavenis told the Times.
On Tuesday, Estonian foreign intelligence officials warned that Russia "is probably anticipating a possible conflict with NATO within the next decade," ERR reported.
Top officials in the three countries have long signaled alarm over Russia's increasing belligerence, and have shown increasing willingness to work independently of NATO to shore up their defenses against the threat, as Business Insider's Sinéad Baker reported.
The new agreement comes against a backdrop of uncertainty about the future of US-NATO support for Ukraine.
The likely Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, recently said he'd encourage Russia to do "whatever the hell they want" to NATO members who aren't spending enough on defense.
On Wednesday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg praised an "unprecedented rise" in member states' spending, with 18 out of 31 meeting the bloc's threshold of 2% of GDP.
In their January agreement, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia also agreed to develop High Mobility Artillery Rocket System capabilities.
"We are intensely collaborating in the negotiations with the U.S. on HIMARS integration, personnel training, system maintenance and service," Arvydas Anušauskas, Lithuania's defense minister, was quoted as saying in a ministry statement.
US-supplied HIMARS have proved invaluable to Ukraine, with the mobile firepower taking out ammo dumps and prompting Russian military leaders to relocate logistics hubs far out of range.