Baltic states: Dragon’s teeth, mines and 1000 bunkers await Vladimir Putin

In the early 1990s a Latvian officer was asked how long his force might hold out against a Russian invasion. ‘About 12 minutes,’ he replied. No so today.

Estonian soldiers on exercise in Lasna. Picture: Getty Images.

In the early 1990s a Latvian army officer was asked how long his force might be able to hold out against a Russian invasion. “About 12 minutes,” he replied. As recently as 2016 a series of war games held by Rand, a strategy think tank close to the US government, concluded that Russian tanks would reach the outskirts of Riga and Tallinn – the Latvian and Estonian capitals – within 60 hours.

The situation is radically different today. NATO promises to defend “every inch” of territory in the three Baltic states and the alliance is assembling three brigade-level forces to protect them, with lines of reinforcement from Germany, Poland and Finland.

Now Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are strengthening a 1600km stretch of their frontiers, the most militarily exposed section of NATO’s eastern flank, with a “Baltic defence line”.

The core element will be well in excess of 1000 concrete bunkers on the three countries’ borders with Russia, Belarus and the militarised Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which lies between Poland and Lithuania.

Estonia alone plans to spend about €60m ($99m) on building 600 of the installations along its 290km frontier with Russia. Each bunker will be roughly 37sq m in size, with space for about 10 soldiers, and will be hardened against artillery strikes, according to Susan Lillevali, the Estonian government’s Undersecretary for Defence Readiness.

There will also be ammunition stores and measures to hold up invaders using anti-tank mines, ditches, concertina wire and concrete pyramids known as “dragon’s teeth” strewn across the battlefield to obstruct armoured vehicles.

“It includes all necessary means to fight against the enemy,” said Lieutenant Colonel Kaido Tiitus of the Estonian Defence League reserve force, an adviser to Lillevali. “This is protection.”

The project is proceeding at great speed, driven by worries that the Kremlin could turn its attention to the Baltic states after Ukraine. Last month Kaja Kallas, the Estonian Prime Minister, told The Times that Russia could be in a position to launch an attack on NATO in as little as three years.

On Wednesday the country’s foreign intelligence agency warned in its annual report that Russia was on course to station up to twice as many troops near the borders of the Baltic states as the 19,000 it had before the full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

It also described Russian plans to create a new army corps, probably based at Petrozavodsk to the northeast of St Petersburg, to cover the 1330km border with Finland. The first prototypes of the Baltic bunkers have already been developed and building work is expected to start as soon as the beginning of next year.

All three Baltic states have recently built fences along large parts of their borders with Russia and Belarus, although they are intended to deter migrants and smugglers rather than tanks. The vast majority of their military infrastructure is further inland.

Comparisons with the Maginot line, a dense network of fortifications erected by France on its eastern border, which failed to deter Nazi Germany from invading, are misplaced.

The idea, according to Major Donatas Palavenis, a Lithuanian army officer and research fellow at the Baltic Institute of Advanced Technology in Vilnius, is to slow an invading force and funnel it into areas where NATO can fight back on more favourable terms.

The scenario that causes the greatest concern to NATO planners is one in which Russia launches a “quick and far-reaching” offensive against the Baltic states and makes substantial gains that the alliance could struggle to reverse.

The defensive line is intended to hold any such invasion in check at the first stage. The Estonian defence ministry estimates that an attacker requires between four and seven times as much manpower to seize these kinds of positions than it would need without the fortifications. Even if the line cannot ultimately be held, it ought to at least buy the defenders valuable time to regroup and receive reinforcements from other NATO member states.

“Building this fortified line will undoubtedly take time and resources, but its effectiveness is evident in the Ukraine war, where troops are not capable of effectively breaching obstacles and gaining substantial territory,” Major Palavenis said.

“As the Baltic states have no defence depth to delay the enemy, the fight would be conducted for each centimetre of territory, requiring a set of man-made obstacles and fortifications to minimise losses.”

The plan is strongly informed by the course of the war in Ukraine, where both sides have had great difficulty in overcoming well-prepared defensive positions over the past year, leading to largely attritional war and static fronts.

Such a battle would, in theory, allow NATO to bring its vastly greater resources to bear and stop a Russian advance before it can build up momentum.

The Baltic states are particularly keen to deny Russia the opportunity to set down defences of its own on any territory that it captures. “We have studied the war in Ukraine and what is behind [the fact] that the Ukrainians’ counter-attack wasn’t successful, and [also] why the Russians cannot keep advancing towards the heart of Ukraine,” Lieutenant Colonel Tiitus said.

“All different kinds of counter-mobility measures are behind that: ditches, dragon’s teeth, minefields. Everything works. The main lesson learnt is that we need to find ways to stop the advance of the Russian armoured units, because if we let them run we might be too late to protect all the countries. That’s why we need to start it from the edge of our borders.”

The Times