Baltic states next? We witness Russia's open lie, aggression – Grybauskaitė, Brzeziński


There’s strong evidence confirming that Russia is taking direct part in the ongoing military operation in eastern Ukraine, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė said on Thursday.

Attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Lithuanian leader on Wednesday briefly discussed the existing situation with her Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko, who brought to Davos a piece of the bus that was hit by a shell in eastern Ukraine, DELFI reports.

“It’s open territorial aggression being carried out not by some terrorists-separatists, but by Russia itself because neither separatists, nor any other people can have such weaponry. You cannot buy it at a town market or on the street. It’s very specific and can be supplied by a major country. And there’s direct evidence that not only Russian weapons are being used, but also the Russian army, its units are taking part,” Grybauskaitė told news agency BNS by phone from Davos.

Russia ‘s representatives are openly lying about the situation in Ukraine, the Lithuanian president said.

“We hear a lot of lies when they say one thing and do the opposite. When one side is being blamed and in fact the other one is not meeting its commitments,” Grybauskaitė said.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accused Russia of sending 9,000 troops to back separatist rebels in the east of his country. At the same time, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a news briefing in Brussels that the Western alliance had monitored Russian troops in Ukraine for several months and seen an increase lately in numbers of tanks, artillery pieces and other heavy equipment.  

Meanwhile, Zbigniew Brzeziński, a foreign policy expert former and presidential national security adviser, voiced fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin might try to take control over Baltic countries in a lightning move that could take NATO by surprise.The United States and its allies should deploy troops to Baltic states to deter Russia from staging a possible incursion in those countries, AFP reports.

A nightmare scenario could be that “one day – and I literally mean one day – he just seizes Riga and Tallinn… That would literally take him one day. There’s no way they could resist,” Brzezinski said.

“And then we’ll say how horrible, how shocking, how outrageous. But, of course, we can’t do anything about it,” he said, without risking a potential nuclear conflict.

www.belsat.eu/en , via Delfi, BNS

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