Lithuania demands the strengthening of NATO's eastern flank if Yevgeny Prigozhin settles in Belarus
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda asked NATO on Sunday to "strengthen" the Eastern flank of the Alliance if the leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, Evgeny Prigojin, settles in Belarus, reports AFP and Agerpres.
The leader of the Baltic country, which borders Russia and Belarus and hosts the NATO summit next month, made the statement after a meeting of Lithuania's security council dedicated to the failed rebellion of the Wagner group against Russia's military leadership.
After Prigozhin ordered his troops - which arrived a few hundred kilometers from Moscow on Saturday - to withdraw to temporary bases in Ukraine, saying he did not want Russian bloodshed, Moscow announced that Chief Wagner would leave Russia for Belarus and will not be charged.
"If Prigozhin or a part of the Wagner group is in Belarus without clear plans and intentions, it simply means that we need to strengthen our security on the eastern borders even more," reasoned the Lithuanian president.
"I'm not just talking about Lithuania today, but definitely about NATO as a whole," Nauseda said.
He also said the Vilnius government would allocate additional resources to intelligence services to assess "political and security aspects in Belarus."
Like many Western politicians, the Lithuanian president believes that after the armed rebellion of the Wagner group, Russian President Vladimir Putin will face even more difficulties in the coming months, in addition to those caused by the war in Ukraine. "The king is empty," Nauseda remarked, referring to Putin.
Politicians and commentators who would like to remove Vladimir Putin from power see Prigozhin's rebellion as a weakening of the Kremlin leader's position. However, a success of this rebellion could have brought to Russia a leadership more hostile to the West than that of Putin.
