NATO's Eastern Flank Tensions: Latvia and Lithuania Under Pressure From Belarus

On Monday, a group of masked, armed men attempted to cross from Belarus into Latvia alongside 20 undocumented migrants. The group was stopped by Latvian troops.

According to Latvian Interior Minister Janis Dombrava, the armed escorts on the Belarusian side threatened Latvian soldiers and actively pushed and herded the migrants toward the Latvian border. Dombrava described the episode as a particularly overt and aggressive provocation compared with earlier incidents.

Later, a group of masked men managed to enter Latvian territory, destroyed an electrical box and made off with surveillance cameras before returning to Belarus. Latvian officials view the act as sabotage staged by Belarus, though it remains unclear whether it was the same group involved in the earlier incident.

Since 2021, Belarus — an ally of Russia — has used migration as a tool to destabilize NATO's eastern flank. Belarus shares borders with Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, with Latvia seen as Europe's weakest link.

Baltic region expert Bartosz Chmielewski of the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies said the EU–Belarus border crisis has now lasted five years and that the situation in Latvia has deteriorated since May. He said the number of border violations and crossings has been rising steadily; in September and October alone, violations reached 12,000, matching the total for the entire previous year.

According to Olevs Nikers, president of the Baltic Security Foundation in Latvia, a Ceuta-style mass surge is physically possible and must be factored into planning. He pointed to the tens of thousands of people who recently crossed from Morocco into Spain. In Nikers' view, however, a more effective strategy may be to sustain low-level pressure over time, because it exhausts resources, strains budgets and breeds tension among allies — as seen when Poland reinstated border controls with Lithuania.

He also noted that Lithuania's border with Belarus is four times longer than Latvia's 173-kilometer frontier, yet the pressure is concentrated on Latvia. In his view, this suggests not a spontaneous migration flow but a deliberate tool, calibrated to test the neighbor deemed most vulnerable.

Any migration pressure from Belarus could cause administrative chaos. With a population of 1.8 million, Latvia is seen as likely to struggle to receive, process and provide medical assistance to potential asylum seekers.

According to the Polish Border Guard, nearly 40,000 people tried to cross from Belarus in 2021, while thousands of other undocumented crossings went unrecorded. Before Russia launched its war in Ukraine in 2022, Belarus built a system of travel agencies, flight routes and visa programs to encourage migrants seeking a better life to cross into the EU from the east, targeting people from the Global South, Latin America, Africa and much of Asia. According to experts, that system has now been dismantled, but Belarus still applies migration pressure when it can.

Nikers warned that a sudden influx of several thousand people into the Latgale region in winter would become a humanitarian and political problem before it became a border security one.

Among NATO's eastern flank states, Latvia appears to be the least prepared for provocations from the east. Analyst Chmielewski argued that Latvia was previously outside the crosshairs, when pressure was focused mainly on Poland and Lithuania, but is now in the spotlight partly because it is insufficiently prepared, its border infrastructure is weak and its border guard's resources are increasingly depleted despite military support. Latvia also struggles to deliver major infrastructure projects in its shortest border section with Belarus because of difficult terrain and limited state operational capacity.

Some other experts argue that migration pressure from Belarus may be a response to recent political developments in Latvia. Marta Jaroszewicz, an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw's Centre of Migration Research, said the coalition led by Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs won Latvia's election and is pursuing the continuation of sanctions against Belarus, so Belarus is using both hard and soft measures to demonstrate its capacity to destabilize the Baltic region. She noted there have been periodic releases of Belarusian political prisoners over the past year with backing from the U.S. administration; Belarus's goal is to have sanctions lifted and to be able to ship raw materials through Baltic ports, including Poland's, moving toward trade normalization.

According to Nikers, Russian and Belarusian pressure on the EU has shifted over the years, with migration just one of many tactics alongside disinformation, arson, recruitment of local citizens and GPS jamming. In his view, 2026 is increasingly shaping up around airspace and infrastructure; the key change is that Russia is moving from targeting what are considered high-value targets to targeting what countries depend on — cables, power grids, positioning systems and airspace — while increasingly operating below the Article 5 threshold.

NATO's Article 5 was established after World War II to guarantee mutual defense among member states against the Soviet Union's expanding threat.

Chmielewski described the pressure as a Russian effort at intimidation, and said what deters Russian aggression on the eastern flank is the unity of European states. In his view, Russia's greatest fear is that if it carried out a more blatant provocation, unity would stretch from Lisbon to Stockholm and the European Union would act as a single front.