Russian President Vladimir Putin has been waging a devastating war in Ukraine for more than three months. But if Ukraine falls, he won’t stop there, Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s first prime minister, said in a explosive new interview on Monday.
“The Baltic states will be next,” Kasyanov, who now serves as leader of the opposition People’s Freedom Party, also known as Parnas, told AFP. Kasyanov began pissing Putin off over a decade ago when Putin, along with Putin’s cabinet, fired him in a pre-election shock 2004 push. Just a few years later, Kasyanov accused the Kremlin of blocking his presidential candidacy.
Kasyanov’s comments on the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — come as Putin’s war enters a protracted phase. The exact course of the war over the next few months is not entirely clear, but Russia still has some gains to make. Only in the last few hours have Russian forces extended part of their control to most of Severodonetsk, a strategically important city in eastern Ukraine.
Kasyanov’s concern about Moscow’s interest in escalating the war echoes recent statements by Putin, which have shaken analysts who fear he is ready to strike and try to “take back” lands he has long considered rightfully part of Russia .
“Peter the Great restored territories and fortified them. That fate fell to us, too,” Putin said last week, referring to Russia’s first emperor and his conquests. “It is also our responsibility to take back and strengthen.”
All of the Baltic states are ex-Soviet republics, making them particularly attractive targets for Putin’s territorial imperialist goals. But both have joined the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which would make a Russian attack on either of them a geopolitically more complex move. An attack on the Baltics could trigger NATO’s Article V, and other NATO allies may have to come to their defense. That could trigger an all-out war with Russia on an unprecedented scale, well beyond the deluge of defense support that the invasion of Ukraine unleashed.
Russian propagandists have predicted that Russia will also go after Poland, Britain and the United States.
But it’s not the first time in recent months that the prospect of a Russian invasion of the Baltics has surfaced. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausea has predicted that “Putin will not stop in Ukraine unless he is stopped”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has sought to reassure Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania of NATO protection and support as Russia has taken caustic moves in Ukraine.
Latvian officials have said they want to strengthen their air and coastal defenses in the face of Russian aggression in recent months. The Baltic states are also preparing to call for an expanded military presence in their countries in light of the Russian war in Ukraine.
“Putin is already out.”
With the future of the war in Ukraine uncertain, the Biden administration has said it stands ready to continue supplying Ukraine with arms and equipment to repel Russian forces and try to prevent a staggering loss, Defense Secretary Lloyd said Austin on Monday.
The Defense Ministry will “work to intensify our joint efforts to meet Ukraine’s priority self-defense requirements in case Russia continues its dangerous attack in Donbass,” the defense minister said.
Regardless of how the Baltic issue unfolds, the future of Russia will also be decided during the war, Kasyanov predicted, noting that Putin seems a little politically upset.
“I just know these people, and when I looked at them, I saw that Putin is already out,” Kasyanov said. “Not in a medical sense, but in a political sense.”
Putin’s future as Russian president will not last long, Kasyanov said, predicting that a “quasi-successor” would eventually emerge and fill the power vacuum.
“I have no doubt that after the tragedy we are all witnessing, the opposition will now unite,” Kasyanov said.
However, it will take time to rid Russia of all possible influences of Putin. “It will be difficult, especially after this criminal war,” Kasyanov said.