Cyberattacks in the Baltics Foreshadow the Future of War

As the fighting in Ukraine drags on, another conflict is taking shape elsewhere on Russia’s periphery. This borderless conflict is aimed at destabilizing the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania but can and likely will expand to engulf others.

Last month, Lithuanian government and public service web portals were hit by a sustained cyber attack from Russian hackers. The attack was a response to Lithuanian enforcement of a European Union sanctions package on goods traveling to and from Kaliningrad, a Russian territory located between Lithuania and Poland. In taking responsibility for the attack, Russian hackers promised that more would be forthcoming.

“The attack will continue until Lithuania lifts the blockade,” a spokesperson for the group told Reuters. “We have demolished 1,652 web resources. And that’s just so far.”

The Baltic states have been on the frontlines of cyber warfare for decades. As the first countries to establish independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, they have remained decidedly anti-Russian in their posture and thus have borne the brunt of Russia’s increasingly sophisticated cyber offensive.

This uneasy situation boiled over in the mid-2000s with a series of aggressive Russian cyberattacks. In 2007, the Estonian parliament…