Influential US think tank looks into ways of improving security measures in Baltics

The delegation of the Atlantic Council, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., took an invitation of the Ministry of National Defence to visit Lithuania on 19-21 October and to become familiar with the Baltic Sea region‘s security situation.

At the meeting, the Lithuanian diplomats and the US security policy experts explored measures to enhance NATO’s collective defence and deterrence measures as response to Russia’s actions, as well as their impact on strategic environment.

The officials dedicated a lot of attention to the implementation of the Readiness Action Plan, which was approved at the NATO 2014 Summit in Wales.

According to Lithuania’s deputy foreign minister, Lithuania seeks to ensure full implementation of the Readiness Action Plan before the next NATO Summit in 2016 in Warsaw.

Krivas thanked the US for its leadership in the implementation of decisions taken in Wales. He stressed that NATO should switch from security measures to deterrence measures, which would effectively prevent efforts to violate security of the Baltic States. The first step is to deploy NATO’s numerous troops in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and to create conditions to rapidly send additional troops, as well as to early deploy military equipment.