Rose-tinted Riga: The Riga Test 2025

 

“Nostalgia is not a strategy”.

For twenty years I have had the honour of attending the wonderful Riga Conference in Latvia.  Every year I have attended I have used the conference to pose the Riga Test – are the good citizens of Riga safer this year than last from their noisy and aggressive neighbour.  The answer?  No.

This was probably my last Riga Conference because for much of it I felt like a spare part who had outstayed his welcome.  There is a perfectly good reason for that because it is time for a new generation of leaders and analysts to take over.  Any legacy I may be leaving is in good hands.  There is a lot of strategic talent coming through.

That said, I left Riga concerned.  My concerns are not with the younger generation but my own and the complacency in which they seem so mired.  Too many senior conference attendees either in positions of power or recently retired seemed all too comfortable, certain that they knew what Putin intends to do next to Latvia and its neighbours Estonia and Lithuania.  If I do not know, they do not know. Their argument rests on the belief that so long as Russian forces are mired in the mud of Ukraine the Baltic States are safe.  They also believe that NATO has Putin exactly where it wants him.  I am not so sure. The number of times at the conference I heard something along the lines of Putin will not do this or that seemed to tempt fate to this Oxford historian. The ‘job’ of deterring Russia is by no means done and it is a profound mistake to believe that just because a Western leader would not take a big risk, a ‘cautious’ (and quite possibly desperate) Putin would not. 

It is precisely this kind of thinking I have been warning against for years. Putin does not think like a Western democrat, and it is a profound mistake to transfer the Western way of thinking onto either Vladimir Vladimirovich or the men around him. It is also precisely because Putin is mired in Ukraine that makes him so dangerous.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Russia’s way of war and its four distinct elements: wars of conquest, wars of destruction, wars of coercion, and wars of exploitation. For Putin war is simply a military means to a grand strategic end – the re-establishment of Russian control over its ‘near abroad’ by whatever means available.  That is what Putin means when he talks of Russkiy Mir.  Ukraine is simply one step towards that grand strategic end which Putin passionately believes he will one day realise simply and tragically because Russians are prepared to suffer more than other Europeans, particularly Western Europeans.

On October 14^th, Vyacheslav Volodin, the Chairman of the Russian States Duma was explicit. Latvian authorities, he said, were persecuting fellow Russians and Moscow had a duty to protect its “compatriots”.  No doubt my conference colleagues would comfort themselves with the thought that NATO stands ready.  Does it?  I have never known the Americans and major Western European powers more politically distracted and strategically inept and thus open to a Russian war of exploitation against them.  Not since the Cold War has the Russian state been so geared for a war of coercion on its neighbours, be it with fighter incursions, drone incursions, sabotage, or a host of other ‘accidents’.  Whilst the West talks about a counter-drone wall, the Russians are already knocking it down.

Even Russia’s ability to conduct a war of conquest is not as far-fetched as my complacent colleagues would like to believe. A former commander of the US Army in Europe asked me to pose a simple question at the panel on military mobility I chaired. In the event of a major Russian attack that combined all four wars of coercion, exploitation, conquest and destruction simultaneously and across the spectrum of information, cyber, sabotage and military power could Latvia hold out the two weeks it would take for Allied forces to arrive in strength.  No.    

Which brings me to what was really missing at this year’s Riga Conference – any elite sense of urgency and a lack of what I call a real joined up defence against exploitation, coercion, conquest and destruction. Declarations have been signed, commitments have been made but to my trained and experienced eye words still seem more important than deeds to free Europe. Nostalgia is not a strategy; complacency is a crime.  

Thank you, Latvia and your mighty Riga Conference. It has been an honour to serve you. Bon voyage!

Julian Lindley-French