Vytautas Isoda: Do small states wage proxy wars? The Baltic States’ military aid to Ukraine

When we hear the term ‘proxy wars’ we tend to think of situations where the big ‘players’ of global politics are moving local ‘pawns’ to do their bidding across different ‘chessboards’ in order to avoid direct military confrontation between themselves. That is how the U.S. and the Soviet Union used to get under each other’s skin in multiple theatres of the Cold War, the way Pakistan has for years been tormenting India in Kashmir. In summer 2020 when Turkey upgraded its support for the Tripoli-based government to turn the tide of the Libyan civil war, the world held its breath fearing it would spark Ankara’s conflict with its NATO ally France which was backing the opposing force of general Khalifa Haftar. Less attention was paid to the fact that the so-called Government of National Accord in Tripoli survived the first several years of the civil war due to significant transfers from a tiny (albeit gas-rich) Gulf state Qatar. Last year when Russia started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, all eyes turned to the United States (and to a lesser extent, major European powers) that had promised tangible support to the Ukrainian government in the months leading up to this war. One tends to overlook the fact that for the past seven years a small Baltic country Lithuania had been regularly providing Ukraine with training and weapons to fight the Moscow-backed proxies in Donbas. In fact, there were times when the number of Lithuanian military instructors in Ukraine nearly matched those of the British and Polish soldiers and was only three or four times smaller than the number of Americans (note that Lithuania is a nation of 3 million people). If the Ukrainians had not modernized their military with the help and guidance from the NATO countries – not least of them Lithuania – they would not have pushed back against the Russians as effectively as they did in 2022.

Taking these facts into account, two questions stand out in particular: why do the small states increasingly engage in activities best described as proxy warfare and does it really matter if their role in military settings will hardly ever match that of the major powers? Motives for the small states to use proxy interventions vary depending on the context. Sometimes experts refer to economic returns this relatively cheap strategy can bring to the small players. In the case of Qatar’s involvement in the Libya, it was mostly control of the Libyan oil and gas reserves they were after; Rwanda’s support for the rebel movements in the Eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo has similarly been fueled by abundant coltan and gold resources in those areas. Most small states, however, have too little resources to begin with only to see them wasted on chasing “El Dorados”. It would be safe to assume that most of them are willing to intervene in distant conflicts only when and if there is a conflict party with perfectly aligned interests already in fight. This is certainly the case for the three Baltic States that have supported the post-Maidan government in Kiev and supplied it with military equipment since 2014. The Balts themselves have always had tense relations with Russia ever since they gained independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. They had clashed with Moscow on multiple occasions in various diplomatic and economic settings (on energy trade in particular) even before 2014. However, the eight year-long conflict in Donbas and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were actually the first chance for the Baltic countries to challenge Moscow militarily, even if indirectly – through the Ukrainian military. As a result of Russian advances, their security interests were so perfectly matched with Ukraine’s that the Lithuanian National Security Strategy of 2017 actually echoed the corresponding document published by the Ukrainian government in 2015 almost verbatim. The Prime Minister of Estonia Kaja Kallas was probably most blunt about it: “Ukraine is now literally at war with our enemy [...]. It is perfectly clear that Ukraine is fighting on our behalf, while everything we give to Ukraine, actually goes to the defense of Estonia”.

What the Baltic countries have actually transferred to Ukraine may look like crumbs in absolute terms (especially when you compare their commitment to that of the U.S. and other major powers), but it is quite impressive relative to their size. According to Ukraine Support Tracker dataset, from 24 January 2022 to 15 January 2023 Estonia donated 308 mln EUR worth of military aid to Kiev, which amounts to almost 1,1% of its GDP; some countries hardly spend as much on their own defence! Estonia is actually leading the list of Ukraine’s foreign donors in terms of military aid to GDP ratio with Latvia and Lithuania taking up the second and the third position accordingly (with 0,9% and 0,5% of their GDP committed to arming Ukraine). This brings us to our second question: does it really matter? The government of Ukraine itself seems to thinks it does. It has described the Baltic military contributions as “timely and important”, and has particularly placed emphasis on the example those arms transfers have set for the major NATO powers. If this was in fact the underlying goal of the governments in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in the first place, one must admit that they made a huge impact on the course of this war and may well have found the most subtle way to wage a proxy war in the history of proxy wars.