The Lithuanian State Defence Council agreed to devote more intelligence capabilities to assessing the situation in Belarus, President Gitanas Nausėda said on Sunday.
The move comes in response to the Kremlin’s statements that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group that staged a mutiny in Russia over the weekend, will have to leave for Belarus as part of a deal to reduce tensions.
Wagner’s aborted revolt marked the most serious challenge yet to Vladimir Putin’s long rule and Russia's most serious security crisis since he came to power in 1999.
The president-chaired State Defence Council “decided that even more intelligence capabilities have to be devoted to assessing our eastern border and the political and security aspects of Belarus, not forgetting, of course, the Kaliningrad region”, Nausėda told journalists after the meeting.
The president said it was also important to accelerate the adoption of “a new border cover plan” to ensure that “the Armed Forces can come to the aid of our border guards in an efficient and, most importantly, timely manner”.
The president expects the plan to be in place before the NATO summit in Vilnius due to take place on July 11-12.
However, no major organisational changes to the general security plan for the gathering will be made despite the recent developments in Russia, according to Nausėda.
“No doubt, both NATO and Lithuania will further strengthen their control and security capabilities in light of certain developments,” he said. “However, we see no need to do anything in principle different from what was done and planned, and everything will be done according to the plan.”
According to Nausėda, the arrival of Prigozhin or part of the Wagner group in Belarus would mean that the security of NATO’s eastern borders would have to be further strengthened.
“After yesterday’s challenges, we can expect all sorts of scenarios because we are dealing with a regime that is beginning to show its weakness,” he told reporters on Sunday, adding that he had no information confirming that Prigozhin was already in Belarus.
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