“With Russia’s full-scale invasion, we rose to the occasion,” Landsbergis said in an interview with POLITICO. “The problem is now that the well is exhausted — the well of compassion, the well of understanding, the well of ability to act — we’re no longer getting any water from it. We’re just trying to dig into the sand.
“We’re so worried about isolationism in the U.S., that the country is looking inwards,” he said. “But is the EU not becoming isolationist? We’re looking inwards more, we’re worrying more about developments within the Union.
“The Germans are worried about the upcoming elections and the rise of the far right. In countries like the Netherlands, the main debate is about migration. France is looking inwards: It’s not clear how the coalition there will work out. Everywhere you look, internal debate is prevailing over everything else.”
The Eastern front
Having themselves been carved up and occupied by the Soviet Union during the Second World War, the three Baltic countries — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — have consistently been among the most hawkish when it comes to the threat posed by Moscow. And, with much of Western Europe preoccupied with political crises, they’ve been consistently pushing for the EU to get a grip on global affairs, taking on reluctance from capitals like Berlin and outright opposition from Hungary and Slovakia.
Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže said the Baltics were ideally placed to drive European foreign policy forward because “our understanding of the threats from Russia is fairly consolidated across the civil, military, nongovernmental, economic, and private sectors in terms of our coordinated response.”
“In other countries, this understanding is not as consolidated, and economic gains and profits are often prioritized at the expense of security concerns or the need for due diligence and proper enforcement of sanctions,” Braže added. According to her, when other EU member countries fail to monitor which trade goods are being shipped to Russia, it falls to countries along the shared border to police what is leaving the bloc.
