“The Baltic states will be next,” Kasyanov, who now serves as leader of the opposition People’s Liberation Party, also known as Parnas, told AFP. Kasyanov began criticizing Putin a decade ago, when Putin fired him along with Putin’s cabinet in a shock election campaign in 2004. Just a few years later, Kasyanov accused the Kremlin of blocking his presidential candidacy. Kasyanov’s comments on the Baltic — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — come as Putin’s war draws to a close. The exact course of the war in the next few months is not entirely clear, but Russia still has some gains. In the last few hours, Russian forces have expanded their control to include most of Severodonetsk, a key strategic city in eastern Ukraine. Kasyanov’s concerns about Moscow’s interest in escalating the war coincide with Putin’s recent comments that annoy analysts, who fear he is ready to “take back” land that he considered rightfully Russian. “Peter the Great returned lands and fortified them. “This fate has also befallen us,” Putin said last week, referring to Russia’s first emperor and his conquests. “It is also our responsibility to recover and strengthen.” Each of the Baltic states is a former Soviet republic, which makes them particularly attractive targets for Putin’s territorial, imperialist goals. But each has joined the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which would make a Russian attack on any of them a more complicated geopolitical move. An attack on the Baltic could provoke NATO Article V and other NATO allies may need to defend themselves. This could spark a full-scale war with Russia on an unprecedented scale, far beyond the storm of defense support sparked by the invasion of Ukraine. Russian propagandists have predicted that Russia will also follow Poland, Great Britain and the United States. But this is not the first time the prospect of a Russian invasion of the Baltic has emerged in recent months. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausea has predicted that “Putin will not stop in Ukraine if he is not stopped.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tried to reassure Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania about NATO protection and support as Russia has made caustic moves in Ukraine. Latvian officials have said they want to strengthen their air and coastal defenses in light of Russia’s aggression in recent months. The Baltic states are also preparing to call for an expanded military presence in their countries, given Russia’s war in Ukraine. “Putin has already escaped.” With the future of the war in Ukraine uncertain, the Biden government said it was ready to continue supplying Ukraine with weapons and equipment to repel Russian forces and try to prevent a stunning loss, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday. “The Ministry of Defense is going to ‘work to intensify our joint efforts to meet Ukraine’s priority demands to defend itself if Russia resumes its dangerous attack on Donbas,’” he said. Regardless of how the Baltic issue develops, Russia’s future will also be determined during the war, Kasyanov predicted, noting that Putin seems to be a little far from his rock, politically speaking. “I just know these people and when I looked at them I saw that Putin was already out of it,” Kasyanov said. “Not in a medical sense, but in political terms.” Putin’s future as president of Russia is not going to last long, Kasyanov said, predicting that a “quasi-successor” would eventually accelerate and fill the power vacuum. “I have no doubt that now, after the tragedy we are all witnessing, the opposition will unite,” Kasyanov said. Getting rid of Russia from any kind of influence by Putin, however, will take some time. “This will be difficult, especially after this criminal war,” Kasyanov said.
