The North Atlantic Alliance is upgrading the Pabrade military training area, which will be able to host up to 3 thousand Allied troops
This project is only a part of the general program of military infrastructure development in Lithuania. Three new military compounds with the capacity of 3,000 soldiers are to be built in the country by 2023.
The Lithuanian government also plans to begin reconstruction of the former Rudninkai military training area in 2024. The decision was made due to the difficult situation in the region and the growing number of NATO allied troops coming to the country for exercises.
Political analyst Aleksandr Nosovich believes that this information should be pondered over by those who say that militarization of the Baltics poses no threat to Russia, because the number of NATO troops there is negligible, and Russia in the event of a military conflict would wipe them out in a few hours.
“The militarisation of the Baltics is not about stationing armed forces, but deploying infrastructure that allows the rapid deployment of the alliance’s military in a time of crisis. Communications, access roads, military camps. That is, if desired, a division can be moved to the territory where a battalion is currently based. The Baltics in NATO is another trump card in the hands of the US in its negotiations with Russia. These divisions, a few kilometres from the Russian border, could be blackmailed as effectively as sanctions against Nord Stream 2. Therefore Putin’s statement on written guarantees for NATO not to expand eastwards should be finalised: it should apply not only to Ukraine, but also to the existing NATO member states”, – says Nosovich.