Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted in a Telegram post that "the main thing is that the planned EU defense line should be built with spikes facing inward," as she commented on the leaders of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland calling for a full-fledged EU support of "a defense infrastructure system" to be created along the bloc’s external border with Russia and Belarus.
The construction of the defense line will address "the dire and urgent need" to secure the EU from what the authors of the letter called military and hybrid threats, in an apparent nod to Russia, according to the four’s letter to the EU leadership.
Hybrid threats include non-military means such as disinformation, cyberattacks, economic pressure and the pushing of migrants across borders.
"The scale and costs of this joint endeavor require a dedicated EU action to support it both politically and financially," the letter added. An estimated cost of the defensive line’s construction along the 700 km EU border with Russia and Belarus is about 2.5 billion euros ($2.67 billion).
This comes a month after Polish Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk announced his country’s plans to join forces with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to build the so-called Baltic Shield, a unified Baltic defense line on the EU’s border with Russia and Belarus.y.
Putin also slammed reports about Russia planning to attack Europe after the end of a special military operation in Ukraine as “complete nonsense and intimidation of Europeans to squeeze money out of them [for defense-related] purposes.”
In mid-2021, tens of thousands of migrants crowded the border between Belarus and Poland, as well as neighboring Latvia and Lithuania, in an attempt to enter the EU. Polish authorities tightened border controls, deployed troops, and accused Belarus of orchestrating a migrant crisis. Minsk rejected the accusations, saying that Warsaw escalated the migrant crisis by pushing migrants into Belarusian territory.