A Conversation With Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania's Former Minister of Foreign Affairs
Maria Tadeo
Grand Continent EU Correspondant14/01/2025
A Conversation With Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania's Former Minister of Foreign Affairs
Maria Tadeo
Grand Continent EU Correspondant14/01/2025
A Conversation With Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s Former Minister of Foreign Affairs
President Donald Trump has suggested that defending America’s economic and security interests will require territorial expansion. He did not rule out military or financial coercion to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. His arguments could be described as similar to those of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Does this concern you?
I was surprised by his comments. Since the invasion of Ukraine began, we have been saying that territorial integrity and sovereignty are paramount. These comments probably put Putin in a better mood than we would have liked.
But there is a crucial difference: Putin has backed up his threats with force. It is entirely possible — in fact, I would argue it is very likely — that President Trump is making these comments to gain leverage and get what he would call a “better deal” for America. The problem is that these statements are the diplomatic equivalent of breaking down the door, entering the room and pushing everyone aside in order to announce his agenda. The US already has the ability to conduct military operations in Greenland. Denmark is one of the most reliable and committed transatlantic partners. I find it hard to understand why he had to break up the room like that. We are now talking about an issue that doesn’t really exist. We are talking about Greenland when we should be talking about Ukraine.
That’s the real issue.
If you follow his argument, President Trump seems to imply that territories can be exchanged if this is necessary to ensure the security of a great power. Putin makes a similar argument about NATO and the demilitarisation of Ukraine. Isn’t this parallel worrying?
The first issue on President Trump’s desk when he enters the White House will be Ukraine. There is a reason why we call this the biggest military conflict in Europe since the Second World War. It is extremely complex.
Ukraine will be the most difficult geopolitical problem for the new administration to solve. Come 20 January, it will be easier for President Trump to answer questions about Greenland than it will be to answer questions about how he plans to end the war in 24 hours. My hope is that when we look back on this moment, we will say ‘wow, that was an odd thing to say’, but it was part of a strategy to shift the conversation away from the harder issues because they are complex and will take more than 24 hours.
President Trump promised the American people a quick end to the war, and President Zelenskiy himself admits that his victory will speed up the end of the war. Will this fixation with time hurt Ukraine in future talks?
Not necessarily. The US has the right tools and has been able in similar situations in the past to formulate a strategy that will allow Ukraine to win. Not to win in the sense that the war is suddenly over. But to enable Ukraine to regain the upper hand on the battlefield. The US — with partners — has the military, financial and industrial capability to do that. If President Trump views the situation through this prism, rather than thinking about how to cover up losses, there are still cards to be played.
For this to happen, something will have to change radically in 2025. What is it?
Escalation. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be escalation. We have to move away from giving Putin the space to escalate and we have to measure how we move up the ladder. Taking the lead means telling Putin that for every action there will be a reaction. And it will be tougher from our side.
This means that the Trump administration would be comfortable with a level of escalation that the Biden administration was not.
It is necessary — and possible — to push back Putin’s nuclear blackmail.
If President Trump were to push back on his nuclear threats, it would create a very different environment. I don’t think we fully appreciate that Russia has managed to create a new nuclear doctrine whereby it can attack a foreign country and threaten a nuclear strike if that country resists. If you resist, you will be nuked. That’s the new Russian doctrine. Because resistance escalates, if you resist really well, as Ukraine is doing, it means nuclear war. Putin has played a very simple game — and we have lost.
What we should say is: Russia, there is a chance that you will lose, but you won’t use nuclear weapons because the cost of that will be so high that you won’t even want to think about it. Whether President Trump can do that, I don’t know. But if he does, that would be a victory in itself, because allowing Russia to pursue this doctrine is a danger to all of us. We can imagine Russia moving in and taking a tiny piece of land in the Baltic. A village, a small town, Russia conducts a lightning invasion and immediately threatens a nuclear strike if we respond. Who would want to escalate to nuclear war over a tiny piece of land,? Except that it raises an existential question for NATO. I can see how some would argue “Article 5 fell to pieces, but at least we avoided nuclear war”, and that is why this doctrine is so dangerous for us — it creates a new reality.
President Trump wants to be seen as a winner. What does that mean for Ukraine?
That is the way the Ukrainians and President Zelenskiy are approaching this issue. Even before the election, the message that Zelenskiy has been trying to get across to the Trump administration — and I think he’s doing it correctly — is that this matters to the US and it matters to President Trump personally, so they should be invested. My sense is that the administration is already more invested than they initially wanted to be.
Should Ukraine rethink what it wants to achieve? With Trump in the White House, Zelenskiy’s determination to join NATO, or at least secure an invitation, may have to give way to other forms of security guarantees.
When people tell me that Ukrainians are detached from reality, I say that unfortunately we are the ones who are detached from reality.
Ukrainians have their feet firmly on the ground. They are very clear about the situation. I don’t think the basis of what Zelenskiy is asking for will change fundamentally, whether you call it a victory plan or a peace plan. It means arms and it means money. There is no other way. Zelenskiy has not abandoned the argument that NATO is the cheapest and best security guarantee we can offer Ukraine, because it is. When we talk about security guarantees, they have to be serious. We can look at South Korea, where the US has two divisions on the front line, that is serious. We can talk about President Trump stationing US divisions in Donbass, although I’m not convinced he would agree to that.
The bottom line is that Ukraine has signed hundreds of documents since the beginning of the war in which we say we will support them. But that’s not a security guarantee. A security plan means that we say clearly: if you are attacked, our troops will help you defend your land, our planes will help you defend your skies, and we will help you defend the Black Sea.
President Zelenskiy said that European security guarantees alone would not be enough to defend Ukraine. The United States must be part of this effort, otherwise it will not work. For some, this was a slap in the face. Is this a reflection of Europe’s own military and diplomatic decline?
No one believes that it is possible to offer credible security guarantees to Ukraine without the United States. I remember Zelenskiy’s statement, and I would say he was quite polite. I understand where he is coming from: when it comes to the ammunition we promised, the one million rounds, we have only partially delivered. Meanwhile, North Korea is producing three million and giving them to Russia. When Emmanuel Macron tried to use the slightest hint of strategic ambiguity, we couldn’t go through with it. I remember when President Macron said he wouldn’t rule out anything to help Ukraine, I thought to myself: this is a page from the Lithuanian playbook. I admired it, but the truth is that we couldn’t develop the idea beyond words. The same goes for sanctions, they are still being circumvented. We say we have gone after Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers, but they are still operating. So when Zelenskiy tells us “I appreciate your efforts, but we need something more”, why are we surprised?
The European Commission has to make a choice: either it goes ahead and makes decisions without a mandate from the member states because it thinks it is the right thing to do to save the Union — but that undermines European democratic principles — or we are stuck with a Council that has been completely hijacked by countries like Hungary. And perhaps that is the problem with the way Europe works at the moment. We are unable to move because we are afraid of jeopardising the European construction itself.
What does Viktor Orbán want?
The Hungarian EU presidency wasn’t our proudest moment — it was a moment of weakness. When it comes to Orbán, it is all about maintaining his power. It’s the same principle with Putin. The main goal is to maintain power. In Lithuania we use the word Ham, the son of Noah in the Bible, to describe someone who not only behaves badly, but goes against all the established rules because he can get away with it.
We are in the age of Ham. The European Union is not equipped to deal with a troublemaker such as Orbán because it wasn’t designed to do so. We reward consensus, we seek compromise. The EU is the product of two terrible wars. But what happens when someone doesn’t want to compromise and makes that his policy? We are powerless. We’re not equipped to react and he gets away with it. That’s the definition of the 21st century political animal. Our model, as it was conceived, is obsolete because we have entered an era of violence.
You have stated that Russia is already waging a shadow war against Europe, citing a series of incidents in the Baltic Sea. You argue that the EU is too afraid to call it what it is: Russian-sponsored terrorism. Are Europeans naive in their assessment of the situation or negligent in their response?
We know what is happening. An undersea cable in the Baltic Sea doesn’t get damaged by accident. It’s not just happened once, it’s happened several times now. It’s not a coincidence. We know it.
So, out of wishful thinking, we decided to look the other way?
If you think about the Covid pandemic, it was a global shock, people died, it was a tragedy, but we found a vaccine and we recovered. The world went back to normal. My concern is that some of our partners still think that Ukraine is something we can end and go back to the world we knew before the invasion started.
Trump will find a magic solution, Putin will reconsider, we’ll think this was a terrible war but it’s over and we can go back to normal.
Only that won’t happen. For Putin, this is his personal quest to rebuild an empire. For Ukraine, this is an existential struggle. If you see Putin as a disease for Europe, to continue the pandemic metaphor, which he is, you have to fight him. You have to defeat him. Otherwise he will continue to hurt Ukraine, he will continue to hurt the Baltics, the Baltic Sea, and his proxies in the Middle East will continue to make a mess.
Mario Draghi said in his report that the fact that we don’t see the consequences of this war on a daily basis, as we did during the pandemic, doesn’t make it any less of an existential threat to Europe. I agree. We were able to make decisions during the pandemic because we thought it was a matter of life and death. We went to the markets, we borrowed, we found solutions outside the box. But we are not doing that with the war. Germany cannot exceed its borrowing limit because the German Constitutional Court might reject it on the grounds that this is not a crisis serious enough to justify more borrowing. I don’t want to over-dramatise, but we have to agree that this is the crisis of our time, that if we don’t step up, Europe as we know it will fall.
China is closely watching the war in Ukraine. Some of your colleagues argued that the Chinese could play a meditative role. You’ve said several times that China can’t play that role because it has chosen a side — Russia’s. Is Europe perhaps inadvertently fuelling China’s ambitions?
I was very concerned when I read an interview in which Antony Blinken – the US Secretary of State – said that China was one of the reasons why Russia had not escalated into a nuclear war. If you follow that line of reasoning, it means that China has become a protector of Europe. That would be the beginning of a new paradigm.
If we accept that China, which in my view supports Russia and is therefore an adversary of the countries supporting Ukraine, is now the guarantor of nuclear deterrence on our continent, it would be a dangerous mistake and a failure.
China is waiting for a moment of weakness to step in and offer “solutions” and I fear that some in Europe would accept this offer because it’s a cheap alternative to us stepping up, in the same way that you buy a Chinese car because it’s cheaper. The same goes for their peace proposals. But you can’t buy these things in the Alibaba shop of geopolitics. If China becomes the guarantor of nuclear safety or peace in Ukraine because the US gives up and Europe won’t do it either, then we are going down a very dangerous road.
It would also put Taiwan on a dangerous course. If China is allowed to play this role, will it speed up an invasion of Taiwan?
I am one of those who believe that an invasion can still be deterred and that we have not reached a stage where it is inevitable.
But it is clear that China’s calculus has changed since the war began, and not in a way that is good for the people of Taiwan, which I fully support.
Ukraine is central to what will happen in the future. In 10 years’ time, history books will be written about the way we have dealt with Ukraine. It will be a starting point for the strategies of democracies against autocrats. I mentioned earlier that Putin has managed to change the nuclear doctrine by getting us to accept, at least for now, that resisting an attack is a form of escalation and therefore a nuclear strike is justified.
One can imagine a situation where China imposes a blockade, even a partial one, on Taiwan and they resist and we try to lift it, then China could use the Russian playbook. That is why I insist that we cannot allow Putin to perpetuate this doctrine. Not just because it paralyses our ability to respond, but because it is dangerous for the world. I don’t think we collectively understand how reckless it is.
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Maria Tadeo, A Conversation With Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jan 2025,