Abstract
Proxy wars are an increasingly common feature of great power competition in the 21st century. In this context, the role of the small states is less clear and has not been properly addressed in the academic literature. Although states of this type have often been chosen as battlegrounds for such wars and have even acted as proxies for the superpowers, this article argues that they are also capable of conducting proxy warfare themselves. Since the start of the 2014 conflict in Donbas, Eastern Ukraine, this country has experienced proxy interventions from many external actors, both large and small, that provided resources to both conflict parties. One of the smallest states which has been trying to affect the course of this conflict in support of the Ukrainian government is Lithuania. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with the security and defence policy-makers in Vilnius, the article aims to explain why Lithuania is punching above its weight and interfering with this conflict from backstage. The empirical evidence points to an almost perfect alignment of interests between the current governments in Kiev and Vilnius in that they both see Russia as their long-term ‘enemy’ which makes Ukraine a surprisingly suitable proxy for Lithuania to exploit.
Introduction
Proxy war is by no means a new phenomenon in the history of international conflict. Its use and significance, however, has only increased over the course of the last few decades as the so called ‘major wars’ became nearly obsolete (Mueller, 1989, 2004). According to UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, back in the 1960s, civil wars with a recorded foreign state interference – although increasingly rife – still comprised only 10%–20% of the total number of armed conflicts in the world; by late 2010s, conflicts of this type amounted to nearly 40% (Strand et al., 2019). With the arrival of nuclear weapons and global economic interdependence, it is only logical that major powers prefer to conduct their competition through various proxies and on distant lands rather than engage in direct military confrontation. In this context, the role of the small states is less clear and has not been properly addressed in the academic literature. Since ‘small states are often treated as objects, not as subjects of international relations’ (Neumann and Gstöhl, 2006: 18), one would assume them to be the battlegrounds for proxy wars or – at best – to do the biddings of the powerful rather than to pick fights of their own. However, various case studies have found smaller states to be both ‘clients’ of the superpowers and international ‘meddlers’ of their own making (e.g. Gleijeses, 2006; Hadar, 2006; Nanes, 2019). Now is as good time as any to finally address the question of when (under what conditions) and why the small players follow in the footsteps of the powerful – albeit to a smaller effect – by interfering in conflicts outside their own borders.
The post-Soviet space, including Ukraine, has long been viewed as a ‘playground’ for the great powers (Loftus and Kenet, 2015; Nitoiu, 2016), primarily Russia, the United States, the European Union, and – more recently and to a lesser extent – China (Kaczmarski, 2017; Song, 2018). All of them have been described as both instigators of civil and cross-border conflicts in this region and drivers for conflict resolution (Dunn and Bobick, 2014; Fawn, 2020; Mearsheimer, 2014; Popescu, 2011). However, it was not until the 2014 war in Donbas, Eastern Ukraine, that the great powers of the Euro-Atlantic area engaged in what essentially is a war by proxies with recorded elements of direct military intervention. 1 As important as this geopolitical clash of the ‘titans’ is for the dynamics of this conflict (Barkanov, 2015; Cadier, 2014), Ukraine has also seen a surprisingly robust interference from the smaller states of the post-Soviet space, such as Georgia (Potočňák and Mareš, 2019) and Lithuania (Dapkus, 2017). Although not so decisive for the outcome of the conflict, their military assistance is greatly appreciated by the conflict parties themselves (e.g. Poroshenko, 2017). It is therefore worth analysing the role and motivation of the small players as well, so as to grasp the full picture behind the frontline and maybe get a better understanding of who (or what) has been fuelling the war in Donbas for the past several years. In terms of research objective, this article is limited to a case study of a single small state’s policy-making, but its secondary aim is to open up new avenues for future research which would involve cases beyond the post-Soviet region.
Lithuania has a long-standing record of advocating Ukraine’s, Georgia’s, and Moldova’s integration into the ‘Western’ geopolitical structures, namely North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU; Galbreath and Lamoreaux, 2007; Park and Jakstaite-Confortola, 2021; Vilpišauskas, 2013: 134–137). The ultimate goal of this stratetgy is to create a stable, prosperous, and democratic zone to the East of the Baltic Sea as much as to counter Russia’s political influence and potential territorial expansion westwards (Galbreath and Lašas, 2013: 162; Jakniūnaitė, 2016: 123). As Maria Mälksoo (2006) puts it in academic terms, ‘while Russia remains conventionally “othered” and securitized by the Baltic states, attempts are being made to concurrently shift the European <. . .> borders further towards the new Eastern neighbours of the EU’ (p. 289). However, up until recently, Lithuanian efforts to support Ukraine’s ‘Euro-Atlantic path’ have mostly involved diplomatic and/or economic measures and as such did not stand out against the context of similar policies adopted by most small nations on NATO and EU’s Eastern flank. The annexation of Crimea by Russia and the outbreak of war in Eastern Ukraine shocked the political elites in Vilnius and made them shift their focus to strengthening Lithuania’s own territorial defence capabilities (Hedberg and Kasekamp, 2018: 225–228). It was therefore counterintuitive to expect that after the 2014 events, Lithuania would transfer any significant resources to foreign countries and get seriously involved in out-of-area military operations. And yet it did. Since autumn of 2015 Lithuania has been sending its military personnel to train the Ukrainian governmental forces and starting from 2016 (and potentially even earlier) has been providing Kiev with weapons and ammunition that were later used at the frontline. These steps were uniquely bold among NATO members of a similar size in that they nearly matched actions taken by much larger players, such as Canada, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Even if Lithuania’s military assistance could only make a modest impact on the course of the conflict itself, it still calls for some very important questions regarding its nature: what was the exact reasoning behind Lithuania’s decision to assist the Ukrainian government facing opposition from within as well as from outside the country, and how this military aid tranformed their bilateral relationship?
Over the course of the field research for this article, a series of semi-structured interviews with the national security and defence establishment of Lithuania was conducted in order to answer the questions posed earlier. Interviewees included four high- and middle-ranking decision-makers at the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence (MoD) as well as four military officers from the Lithuanian Armed Forces that were involved in organizing the training of Ukrainian government soldiers on the ground. Due to the veil of secrecy and political sensitivity shrouding potential proxy activities of any government, the narrative provided by the government itself cannot be the only source of information and is usually crosschecked with other public sources. Thus, the original material collected through interviews was supplemented with open source data from both Lithuanian and non-Lithuanian government websites and mass media.
The first section of this article reviews the state of the literature on proxy wars and adapts this concept to the established laws and behavioural patterns attributed to the world of small states. It winds up with a simple working hypothesis on the conditions under which a small state can reasonably be expected to engage in proxy activities abroad and how those activities would look like if and when conducted by a small state. The second section dissects the conflict in Donbas from the perspective of proxy war theory. This helps to contextualize Lithuania’s role in this conflict. Finally, section ‘The war in Donbas as a proxy conflict’ presents the empirical evidence of and a plausable explanation for Lithuania’s involvement in the Donbas war which will hopefully serve as a good starting point for future research on small states’ interference in conflicts outside their own borders. A brief passage on which direction that future research may take is provided in the concluding section.
Proxy war theory meets small states
Over the past decade, proxy wars scholarship – which draws most of its theoretical weight from the classical principal-agent theory in political science – has been one of the fastest growing bodies of literature in peace and conflict studies (e.g. Berman and Lake, 2019; Brown, 2016; Groh, 2019; Mumford, 2013; Rauta, 2018, 2021; Rauta and Mumford, 2017; Salehyan, 2010). Even though scholars generally agree that proxy war ‘constitutes a form of interstate conflict, albeit indirect’ (Salehyan et al., 2011: 710), this strand of literature remains surprisingly silent about the different types of states that typically do or do not get involved in such conflicts (either as targets or perpetrators of proxy activities). To be precise, in his book-length study on intrastate insurgencies, Seth G Jones (2017: 136–139) has established some empirical evidence that global great powers (compared to immediate neighbours and other states) are the most desirable and most successful foreign supporters of domestic insurgent groups in civil conflicts, but this comes as no surprise given the material resources and strategic determination such states usually possess. Tyrone L Groh (2019: 4) also suggests that states ‘with significant regional or global interests and the means to pursue them’ are the ‘natural’ candidates to wage proxy wars, but he nonetheless contends that ‘proxy war as a tool of foreign policy does not belong exclusively to powerful states’. Discussing the prevalence of proxy conflicts during the Cold War, Andrew Mumford (2013) concludes that superpowers have certainly [perfected] the strategy of war by proxy, but smaller powers have also attempted to indirectly intervene in conflicts outside their own borders; [a]n explanation of who engages in proxy wars does not ultimately correlate with a state’s power status in the broader scheme of international relations. (p. 51)
Most other scholars, however, do not even consider (at least not explicitly) the possibility that a small state could employ a proxy in a conflict with another state or a non-state actor.
One of the reasons why small states as a category have rarely been discussed in the context of proxy wars is the very definition of state ‘smallness’ in international politics. If by definition, small states tend ‘to adapt to – rather than dominate – their external environment’ (Wivel et al., 2014: 5–6), ‘exhibit a low level of participation in world affairs, <. . .> employ diplomatic and economic foreign policy instruments, as opposed to military, <. . .> [and] avoid conflict with others’ (Hey, 2003: 5), then any state actively supporting (or even controlling) one party in a foreign conflict cannot be considered properly ‘small’. However, none of the existing accounts of small state behaviour in international politics suggests that small states are completely impotent or disengaged, only that their capabilities in relation to most other states are very limited (Elman, 1995: 171, note 1; Steinmetz and Wivel, 2010: 5–7). The latest literature on proxy wars provides an elegant solution to this apparent incompatibility of the two concepts. It places biased third-party actions in the context of an ongoing military conflict in a spectrum ranging from direct use of military force to ‘proxy warfare’ – defined as ‘directing the use of force by a <. . .> local actor to indirectly influence’ the course of the conflict (Groh, 2019: 2–3) – to what Eli Berman and David A Lake call ‘capacity building’ (Berman et al., 2019: 11, 20–21) and Tyrone L Groh (2019: 2–8, 28–29) refers to as ‘donated assistance’. Although the last two are both forms of indirect intervention, the difference between ‘proxy warfare’ proper and ‘capacity building’/‘donated assistance’ to one of the conflict parties is that the latter ‘describes the act of aiding an indigenous actor <. . .> without strings attached – without the intent or need to control the proxy’s actions’ (Groh, 2019: 28). In other words, the relationship between the external actor and the party to a conflict is not hierarchical with the external donor assuming the role of the ‘principal’ and the aid recipient subscribing to be her ‘agent’. Whereas controlling the proxy and preventing ‘agency slack’ (Salehyan, 2010) entails a particular level of costs which the ‘principal’ may or may not be able to bear in the end, the strategy of donated assistance – even though part of the same phenomenon of proxy activities – is not bound by any threshold on resources. It means that, at least in theory, donated assistance can be provided by a small state to a much more powerful actor without changing their mutual power status and to the extent that the small state can afford (and sees the need) to provide it.
When it comes to causal theories of why states choose indirect meddling in outside conflicts, the existing literature does not strictly differentiate between the two forms of indirect action – that is, proxy warfare and donated assistance (capacity building). Andrew Mumford (2013: 30–44) is correct to point out that the underlying reasons for military actions against a perceived adversary or a target are more or less the same whether those are direct or through proxy, and have mostly to do with security or ideological interests. In this case, the question ‘why’ does not imply ‘what for’, but rather ‘why in this manner’. Among the factors affecting the choice between direct and indirect intervention scholars typically refer to the costs of each policy option in terms of financial resources, casualties, international prestige and domestic support for the intervening power, also the risk of escalation and the expected result (Groh, 2019: 26; Hughes, 2014: 523–524; Salehyan, 2010: 508–509; Salehyan et al., 2011). Even though the conventional wisdom holds that indirect action allows the intervener to reach a similar result with less money, casualties, domestic and international backlash, the actual costs of proxy intervention depend on the level of alignment of interests between the intervening power and its proxy: if the principal is much more interested in [neutralizing] a threat [or harming a certain target] than the local proxy is, it will be extremely costly for the principal to apply sufficient rewards and punishments to make the agent comply. (Berman et al., 2019: 3–4)
That is why, as noted by Vladimir Rauta (2018), ‘in most cases, proxy wars unfold against the background of ongoing wars where <. . .> the proxy is already in a clearly defined antagonist relationship with the target’ (p. 458; see also Loveman, 2002: 32). Where firm relations of enmity do not exist, a powerful outside actor can potentially bear the cost of ‘hiring’ and controlling an otherwise disinterested local agent (or even create one from scratch). It would be safe to assume, however, that a small state (a) will only get indirectly involved in an outside conflict when there is a conflict party with perfectly aligned interests already in fight and (b) will only provide limited resources to that party. The clear limits of the resources small states can provide will most likely also limit their say in how those resources are to be used; in other words, small states will likely be bound to a strategy of capacity-building/donated assistance, but it does not mean that it cannot progress into a full-blown proxy warfare over time as the recipient becomes accustomed to even small donations.
This research admittedly builds on a rather broad understanding of ‘proxy (indirect) intervention’ as it does not consider the principal–agent relationship – that is, one of control and subordination – to be the essential attribute of this policy instrument. The purposeful and unidirectional flow of aid from an external actor to a participant of a military conflict is the defining feature of this phenomenon whereas the change in power relations between them may be a result of as much as a precondition for that aid. If the hypothesis about the ‘when’ and the ‘how’ of small states’ proxy interventions proposed here is correct, the donor will hardly need to push or pull the aid recipient (the ‘proxy’), but whether relations of power and control between them eventually occur is essentially an empirical question worth answering in each case study.
Finally, following Andrew Mumford’s (2013: 45) outline of all conceivable donor-belligerent diads – state to state, state to non-state actor, and non-state to non-state actor – one can easily derive the range of diads involving a small state: small state to great (or regional) power, small state to small state, and small state to non-state actor. Some scholars have noticed that any principal–proxy relationship in the context of proxy war somewhat resembles a traditional (asymmetric) alliance between states in terms of ‘moral hazard’ and attempts to restrain one’s partner (Groh, 2019: 30–31; also see Pressman, 2008). Therefore, one is tempted to define the ‘state to state’ diad as simply wartime collaboration between allies, especially since most military alliances are formed ‘against specific other states’ (Snyder, 1990: 104). However, I argue that employing a proxy and siding with an ally in the context of an open military conflict differ in a few important respects. First, even though most alliance treaties are vague as to what type of assistance each member of the alliance ‘owes’ to another in case of war against a third party, the general expectation is of ‘actual involvement in hostilities on the same side’ (Modelski, 1963: 775), not simply provision of arms, training and other resources; the academic literature on alliances and alignment in international politics usually differentiates between cross-border military aid provided by a ‘patron’ state to its ‘protectorate’ and direct commitment by the patron to fight alongside as two complementary, but separate policy options (Yarhi-Milo et al., 2016). Second, the principal–agent relationship in the context of proxy war can be – and usually is – covert (Groh, 2019: 97–99; Loveman, 2002: 32) so as to minimize the principal’s reputational losses (the so called strategy of ‘plausible deniability’), whereas any military aid provided by a state to its ally in an hour of need should preferrably be made public so as to maintain the appearance of alliance and deter future attacks. When it comes to proxy activities, the level of openess is likely to correlate with the power status of the targeted ‘enemy’. Even a powerful state can reasonably be expected to hide its links to a proxy who brings direct harm to another great power so as to avoid escalation. A small state – if it chooses to target another country through proxy – is even more likely to do it covertly as by definition it has limited capabilities to withstand a direct retaliation against itself.
The war in Donbas as a proxy conflict
It is difficult to put a label on the conflict in the Donbas region, Eastern Ukraine, which broke out in spring 2014 as being an ‘internationalized civil war’ or an ‘interstate conflict’ between Ukraine and Russia. Most scholars analysing the root causes of this conflict agree that without the (in)direct Russian intervention, the divergence of economic interests and markers of identity between the central authorities in Kiev and the Donbas region would not have resulted in a full-scale war and a strive for seccession (e.g. Allison, 2014; Kuzio, 2015: 163; Malyarenko and Wolff, 2018: 199–203; Wilson, 2016). As Andrew Wilson (2016) concludes, there was sufficient alienation from Kyiv [towards the Eastern Ukrainian regions] to provide a baseline for a local civil conflict, and that alienation fed off a long-standing tradition of social distance in Donbas identity, but <. . .> all the key triggers that produced [an] all-out war were provided by Russia and by local elites in the Donbas. <. . .> [L]ocal elites and Russia combined to create a separatist movement from weak and patchy ‘grassroots’ material. (pp. 631–633)
As the public pretext for the Donbas insurgency was the Euromaidan revolution of 2013–2014 (Sakwa, 2015; Samokhvalov, 2015: 1381; Wilson, 2014, 2016), which – although initially not ‘anti-Russian’ (Shelest, 2015: 194) – brought pro-European and pro-Western elites to power in Kiev, Ukraine became a ‘natural’ battleground for a proxy war between Russia and ‘the West’.
The academic debate over Russia’s involvement in the Donbas conflict generally does not concern whether it intervened on behalf of the separatists or not, but rather to what extent, in what form, and at which point in time Moscow did it. The greatest disagreement revolves around the initial stage of the rebellion from March to July 2014 with some scholars maintaining that the separatist organizations – the so called ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk – were mostly homegrown (Robinson, 2016: 511–512; Sakwa, 2015: 155–156), and others insisting that Russia supported (or even led) the separatist efforts from the very beginning (Bowen, 2019: 325–331; Wilson, 2014: 129–130). What is clear is that at least certain individuals – mostly Russian citizens with career background in the Russian intelligence services and/or strong affiliation with the Kremlin (most famously Igor Girkin-Strelkov, Alexander Borodai, Igor Bezler and others) – organized the rebel forces and led them into battle against the Ukrainian army. Original research on the self-organization and recruitment efforts of the separatist forces in the early 2014 indicate that a large number of prospective rebels received training in Russian military bases across the border (Kudelia, 2019: 291). Multiple pieces of evidence point to Russia supplying heavy weaponry to the Donbas militants from the early stages of the rebellion, including BUK surface-to-air missile systems famous for downing flight MH17 in July 2014 (Wilson, 2014: 129–130). Moscow also hired (semi-)private Russian security company ‘Wagner Group’, not least to instil order and compliance among the rebel leadership (Marten, 2019). Even though some proxy war theorists consider contractual relationships between states and private military companies to be apolitical and somewhat streching the definition of proxy warfare (Groh, 2019: 28–29), the Wagner Group’s close ties with the Russian state blurs the fault lines between business and national interests. In other words, if not directly interfering, Russia was certainly conducting acts of war through its proxies from the very early stages of the war in Donbas.
A constant feature of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine since spring 2014 was its public denial of any involvement on the rebel side. As Andrew Bowen (2019: 335) contends, up till late July to early August 2014, Russia was able to retain a level, no matter how tenuous, of deniability and present a narrative of the [Donbas] conflict as an internal [Ukrainian] conflict. However, it also resulted in a lack of control and effectiveness. <. . .> Russia’s experience demonstrates that managing the level of control relative to deniability is a fundamental attribute of using proxies. <. . .> [V]arious ad hoc and improvised adjustments had failed to achieve the initial Russian objectives. Russia was faced with either intervening [directly] to stave off a complete rebel defeat, or to accept failure.
Apart from occasional shelling of the Ukrainian forces accross the Russian–Ukrainian border, and the infiltration of the GRU (Russian military intelligence) battalion ‘Vostok’ among the ranks of rebel forces by May 2014 (Bowen, 2019: 328; Wilson, 2014: 136), the battle of Ilovaisk (August to September 2014) was the first major case of direct intervention by the units of Russian regular forces, members of which were captured by Ukraine as prisoners of war. According to Bowen (2019), as more and more Russian troops became involved in direct action, the narrative shifted from denying their presence to cultivating a proper frame in which to argue for their presence <. . .> The story quickly became that while there were active duty Russian troops in Ukraine, they were there of their accord and on vacation from their units. (p. 331)
With major battles finished and frontlines stabilized by spring 2015, Russia has retained a varying number of its troops – primarily special operations units, staff officers and military instructors – in Donbas to the day of writing this article and has integrated them with the rebel military structure (Robinson, 2016: 515–516). Even though the actual numbers will likely remain unknown, the level of deployments seems to be increasing rather than decreasing since 2014 (see Table 1). In theoretical terms, over the course of this conflict, Russia has moved from a pure form of proxy warfare to what Idean Salehyan (2010: 503–504) calls a ‘blended strategy’ of delegating some tasks (and related costs) to proxies and intervening directly to fight alongside; in the end, the two separatist republics proved to be ‘high-cost’ proxies (Berman et al., 2019: 17) for Russia to work with.
Foreign forces on the territory of Ukraine (excluding Crimea) since 2014.
Source: IISS Military Balance, 2015–2021. Note that only contributions to the JMTG-U (also known under the code name Operation Unifier in Canada and Operation Orbital in the United Kingdom) by the five NATO countries are included here. Unarmed observers of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (seconded by both Russia and the NATO countries) are not counted in as they do not actively support any of the conflict parties.
The Ukrainian government, which officially launched an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against the rebel forces in Donbas as early as 15 April 2014, also found itself in charge of a fairly incapable military and in need of external support; according to Deborah Sanders (2017: 36), ‘in light of increased Russian support, there was a growing asymmetry between the combat effectiveness of the separatists in the East and the ill-prepared and increasingly outnumbered Ukrainian force’ for the first several months at least. NATO and the EU countries officially supported Ukrainian territorial integrity by imposing a series of economic sanctions on and pushing for a diplomatic isolation of Russia (Gould-Davies, 2020; Stent, 2014: 294–306), but this did not help Ukraine directly at the frontline. Only in December 2014, the United States Congress (2014) passed the so called ‘Ukraine Freedom Support Act’ which authorized the President ‘to provide defence articles, defence services, and training to the Government of Ukraine’. In late April 2015, the US Army European Command finally deployed some 300 paratroopers to train the Ukrainian soldiers according to NATO standards at the Yavoriv training site, Western Ukraine, and had the first few battalions graduate from the programme by early 2016 (Batyuk, 2017: 469). The Americans were soon joined by Canadian, British, Polish, and Lithuanian instructors (see Table 1) to form the ‘Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine’ (JMTG-U) with various other NATO countries setting up trust funds to modernize the C4, medical rehabilitation, logistics and other vital aspects of the Ukrainian military; all these scattered efforts were subsumed under the framework called ‘Comprehensive Assistance Package’ to Ukraine at the 2016 NATO Summit in Warsaw (Shea and Jaroszewicz, 2021: 167). This reinforced the impression that NATO as a block had a vested interest in Ukraine successfully countering Russia and its proxies.
However important was the diplomatic support, military training or humanitarian aid Ukraine received from its Western allies, at the end of the day, it badly needed arms and ammunition to mount an effective response to the Russian-backed rebellion. The United States, the world’s number one supplier of advanced weaponry, once again made itself available to assist the sympathetic government in Kiev. Even though Ukraine was eligible for funding under most of US security assistance programmes even before the Donbas war, the establishment of ‘Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative’ (USAI) under the National Defence Authorization Act for 2016 (United States Congress, 2015) nearly tripled the cash flow and placed Ukraine among the top recipients of US military aid (see Table 2). The Obama administration, however, was reluctant to provide Kiev with any lethal arms so as not to escalate the conflict with Russia; only in December 2017, under the newly elected President Donald Trump, the United States decided to sell defensive anti-tank and anti-armour weapons, including American-made missiles Javelin that became famous during the impeachment trial of the President himself (Plokhy and Sarotte, 2020). Accounting for the significant support Washington threw behind the government in Kiev in the midst of this conflict, some scholars went as far as calling Ukraine a ‘U.S. client state’ in parallel to ‘the separatist republics in Donbas [that] became de facto client states of Russia’ (Katchanovski, 2016: 482). Even though the Americans have not been able (nor have they really tried) to control the Ukrainian government to the extent Moscow controls the separatist republics, in a very real sense and against its own best interest Ukraine gradually become the battleground for a proxy war between the United States and its allies on one side and Russia on the other side.
US bilateral security assistance to Ukraine through its main global and regional financial instruments (2012–2020).
Source: Security Assistance Monitor database at https://securityassistance.org.
under Sec. 506 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, The President of the United States can draw additional funding for foreign military aid after he or she reports an emergency to the Congress.
Explaining Lithuania’s part in the Donbas war
Lithuania was one of the first countries to throw rhetorical and diplomatic support behind the pro-Western government in Kiev after Crimea was annexed by Russia and Russian-backed separatists revolted in Easter Ukraine (e.g. Linkevičius, 2014; Murmokaitė, 2014). However, in terms of military efforts, the Ukrainian crisis first prompted Lithuania to augment its own defence capabilities that were gradually scaled down after it joined NATO and the EU in 2004 (Hedberg and Kasekamp, 2018: 223–224; Janeliūnas, 2019: 180–181). With regard to Ukraine, Vilnius first tried to influence the positions of other EU countries and the Union as a whole, including shaming them into providing Ukraine with tangible defence capabilities. The then President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite delivered her country’s viewpoint most explicitly back in August 2014, ahead of a critical EU summit in Brussels: it is the fact that Russia is in a state [of] war against Ukraine. That means it is in a state of war against a country which would like to be closely integrated with the EU. Practically Russia is in a state of war against Europe. <. . .> That means we need to help Ukraine to defend its territory and its people <. . .>, especially with the military materials <. . .> because today Ukraine is fighting a war on behalf of all Europe. (quoted in Howell, 2014)
This illustrates how very early into the Donbas conflict Lithuania saw the potential for something akin to a proxy war against Russia even if initially it did not back it up with necessary capabilities.
The Baltic states, Lithuania among them, have had tense relations with Russia for almost three decades since they gained independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Various studies have concluded that their bilateral relations with Moscow are defined by ‘historical distrust’ and an overall ‘security dilemma’ (Galbreath and Lašas, 2013: 149) wherein Russia is ‘the main negative Other’ (Jakniūnaitė, 2009: 119) posing an existential threat to their survival. After the 2014 events in Ukraine, the Parliament of Lithuania (the Seimas) adopted a new National Security Strategy in which it explicitly stated that in the current period, the main threat to the security of the Republic of Lithuania is posed by the aggressive actions of the Russian Federation <. . .> its large scale offensive capabilities and their exercises near the borders of Lithuania, <. . .> [its] capacity to use military and economic, energy, information and other non-military measures in combination against the neighbouring countries. (Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania, 2017)
Lithuania had already clashed with Moscow on the international scene on multiple occasions, mostly in areas such as energy trade and historical memory (Grigas, 2013; Mišíka and Prachárová, 2016; Onken, 2009), but the 2014 conflict in Donbas presented the first chance to potentially challenge Moscow militarily, even if indirectly. In other words, from the perspective of Lithuanian national security discourse, siding with someone who is pushing back against Russia’s military offensive falls perfectly in line with the general framework of containing the ‘Russian threat’.
Having in mind the initial lack of preparedness and low morals of the Ukrainian armed forces at the outset of the 2014 crisis (after all, Crimea was famously lost without firing a single shot), it was only logical for Lithuania to answer Washington’s call to join the multinational training efforts of the JMTG-U from autumn 2015. However, the empirical evidence collected for this research shows that Lithuanians got involved in JMTG-U not (or at least not primarily) because they wanted to please their most trusted ally, but because their strategic interests were clearly in line with the Ukrainian cause. According to one of the interviewees from Lithuanian MoD, ‘if the Americans had not initiated this programme, we [Lithuania] would probably have found another format to support the Ukrainian military anyway’ (Interview 4). For almost 2 years, a varying number of Lithuanian military instructors worked under individual secondments to Ukraine, but had no formal status as a military contingent. In early 2017, the security and defence policy establishment in Vilnius started discussing the possibility to upgrade Lithuania’s role to a national mission, similar to the United Kingdom’s Operation Orbital and Canada’s Operation Unifier, and persuaded the government of Ukraine to sign a Status of Force Agreement. On 27th June 2017, the Seimas of Lithuania approved the deployment of the first ever national military mission, albeit exclusively limited to training tasks. The maximum number of military personnel deployable to this mission was capped at 60 (even though in reality, it amounted to around 40 soldiers at its peak) with the force headquarters set in Kiev and several training teams operating across all of Ukraine, primarily at Yavoriv and Desna training sites. In 4 years, Lithuanian instructors held some 120 training courses and over 4000 Ukrainian service-men and women graduated from them. Even though the least disclosed to the public eye, the most successful – according to most experts – was the cooperation between Lithuanian Special Operations Forces and their Ukrainian counterparts (Interviews 1, 3, 6 and 7). In the words of one Lithuanian staff officer, it is hard to measure exactly how much the training done by our soldiers and those of other NATO countries contributed to the modernization of the Ukrainian military, and their later success at the frontline, but it is an undeniable fact that the Ukrainian army of 2014 is merely a shadow of the capable force it is today. (Interview 8)
When it comes to supplying the Ukrainian government with tangible military materials, Lithuania pioneered the provision of lethal weapons among NATO allies, even if less technologically sophisticated and in smaller quantities than those later provided by the United States. According to the representatives of Lithuanian government who participated in making those decisions, Lithuania’s early transfers were meant to set an example for richer and more militarily capable NATO and EU countries, but they actually killed two birds with one stone by simultaneously reinforcing the Ukrainian units in Donbas (Interviews 2, 5 and 8). In fact, for exemplary acts, one would expect those weapon transfers to be much more publicized than they actually were with some interviewees mentioning some donations to have taken place as early as 2015 (Interviews 2 and 8), even though there is no public record of them (see Table 3). The same interviewees also claim that Lithuania acted on its own initiative and received no mandate (neither official, nor backstairs) from the United States or any NATO ally to commence those weapon transfers, nor was it promised any compensation from them 2 (Interviews 2 and 8); the fact that it took at least 2 more years (till mid-2018) for the United States to deliver their first shipment of lethal weapons to Ukraine after Vilnius and Kiev undertook a similar transaction makes it even harder to argue that Lithuania was only ‘testing waters’ for Washington. Even if most of Lithuania’s transfers were merely symbolic in terms of nominal value of the items donated, they do match the definition of capacity-building/donated assistance outlined in the first section of this article and fall into the range of possible activities practised by states in the context of proxy wars.
Some of Lithuania’s weapon transfers to Ukraine (free of charge) since the start of the 2014 conflict in Donbas.
Source: Public records of the Government of Lithuania crosschecked with media releases.
The most intriguing aspect of Lithuania’s recent military aid to Ukraine is the level of control Vilnius does or does not exercise over Kiev’s actions in return for that aid as it would place their bilateral relations somewhere in the spectrum of principal–agent relationships. First, there is the official line of influence through the Multinational Joint Commission (MJC) which coordinates international security assistance to Ukraine and includes representatives from seven donor countries (mostly contributors to JMTG-U). Then there is the less formal Defence Reform Advisory Board (DRAB) which is advising the Ukrainian Minister of Defence on strategic matters related to developing military capabilities. In the latter body, Lithuania has been represented by retired two-star generals since its very inception in 2016, and due to their expertise and personal ties with the Ukrainian defence elite Lithuania has stepped into a role disproportionately influential compared to its size (Interviews 1, 4 and 7). This informal influence seems to materialize through direct phone calls and undisclosed meetings between officials at the highest levels (Interview 4). Most of the Lithuanian officials interviewed for this piece, however, were somewhat vague as to which issue areas this influence actually covers, one of them passingly mentioning certain defence procurement and strategic communication decisions taken by the Ukrainian government, although it was not clear whether those decisions directly pertained to the Donbas campaign (Interview 1). Even though Vilnius has never asked Kiev to ‘repay’ for the military aid it provided over the past 7 years (at least not explicitly), most of the interviewees did conclude that overall their country has earned certain leverages when it comes to steering the Ukrainian security and defence policy (Interviews 1, 4, 5 and 7). It may be far from the principal–proxy relationship of the kind that Russia enjoys with the separatist republics, but it does suggest that both sides to the Donbas war were potentially getting ‘tips’ and ‘instructions’ from behind-the-scenes.
Last but not least, one must address the question of why Lithuania is doing what it is doing with regards to the war in Eastern Ukraine, what strategic goals and expectations were attached to its military training efforts and arms transfers, and whether those expectations were met so far. As it was already mentioned earlier, Lithuania’s national interests are almost perfectly aligned with those of the post-Maidan government in Kiev, even more so after this new Ukraine came into (semi-)direct conflict with Russia (Interview 1). None of the interviewees explicitly admitted – it was probably unreasonable to expect they would – that Lithuania supported Ukraine only to drag the conflict out and wear their ‘archenemy’ down as much as possible. However, they did mention it was in Lithuania’s best interest that Ukraine would withstand this Russian-orchestrated campaign and thus deter Moscow from similar endeavours against other post-Soviet countries (Interviews 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8), and for the last 7 years since this war started this goal has essentially been achieved. They also suggested that contributing to the American-led JMTG-U helped Lithuania to improve its status among NATO allies – which has usually been its rational for out-of-area deployments (Isoda, 2022) – and brought the Ukrainian military closer to NATO standards thus backing Lithuania’s long-term strategy of NATO expansion to the East (Interviews 4 and 5). Over the last few years, Kiev has apparently asked Vilnius for a more direct military interference at the frontline on multiple occasions (even suggested employing the joint Polish–Lithuanian–Ukrainian army brigade, known as LITPOLUKRBRIG; Interview 8), but each of these times the Lithuanian government considered an indirect role in this conflict would be more compatible with their country’s national interests (Interviews 2, 4 and 5). And even though many decision-makers interviewed for this article claimed they were not afraid of Moscow’s reactions with regard to Lithuania’s military aid to Ukraine (Interview 1, 4, 5 and 6), all of them implied that Vilnius was content with this ‘backseat’ arrangement and preferred to avoid a more robust backlash from Russia.
Conclusion
Small states may not be the ‘usual suspects’ to conduct proxy warfare outside their immediate neighbourhood, but it is certainly not a ‘mission impossible’ for them either. This is especially true if the proxy war itself is defined in a broader sense and associated with various forms of outside interference in military conflicts – not only hierarchical relationships between external ‘principals’ and infiltrated ‘agents’, but also more or less equal partnerships that result in military assistance/capacity building from across state borders. In a way, the strength of the small states lies in their numbers (in that the vast majority of states across the globe are small powers) and if enough of them support the same party in a given conflict, the grand total of their donated assistance may render that party highly dependent on external aid, even if it does not succumb to a full control from outside and become somebody’s ‘proxy’. This is very much the case with the current government of Ukraine, which acquired so many external donors since the start of the 2014 crisis that their collective aid nearly matched Moscow’s unilateral assistance to the Donbas separatists, the Ukrainian government’s direct enemy at the frontline. Even though one of Ukraine’s donors with regard to the war in Donbas was the United States, the world’s leading military power, the limited scope of Washington’s aid did not seem to give it a much higher profile among the intervening actors or a decisive voice with regard to policy decisions taken in Kiev (what the US President Donald Trump apparently learned the hard way), so the lesser powers assisting Ukraine in its (semi-direct) fight against Russia are in that sense punching above their weight.
Lithuania is probably the smallest of Ukraine’s military donors, but certainly not the least visible, nor the least influential. It even pioneered some of the capacity-building activities with regard to this conflict (namely transfering leathal weapons to Kiev) that were later picked up by larger states, so in a sense, Lithuania was not only making use of Ukraine to target Russia (or the Russian power projection), but also shaming others into doing the same; this may have been the most subtle way to wage a proxy war seen so far. If what Lithuania is doing in Ukraine is indeed a form of proxy warfare – and it does seem to match the definition of ‘donated assistance’/‘capacity building’ at least – it is certainly a defensive war, at least from the Lithuanian point of view. The security and defence policy elite in Vilnius claims to have acted only in response to the Russian moves in Donbas and after carefully evaluating Lithuania’s own interests, which happened to be perfectly in line with those of the post-Maidan Ukrainian government. These findings essentially support the working hypothesis put forth in the first section of this article on the external conditions leading to a proxy intervention from a small state. And even though this case study suggests that small powers are more or less capable of waging a proxy war – at least to a certain extent – it does not contradict the age-old truism of small powers being primarily concerned with their own survival. No matter how interested Lithuania was in Ukraine’s military success with regard to the war in Donbas, its actions have always been very mindful of a possible Russian retaliation and (in spite of various temptations) never came even close to a direct military intervention.
With regard to the broader question of small states’ capacity to wage proxy wars, the Eastern Ukrainian conflict is not a typical case in that most of the external powers – including the small ones – are backing the same side, the Ukrainian government, against the Donbas separatists that are exclusively one country’s ‘project’. In many cases, any single small state which is considering an indirect intervention in a foreign war may not have the luxury of this ‘economy of scale’. Taking this into account, it would be interesting to test how the hypothesis worked up in this article would stand against empirical evidence form the Syrian or Libyan theatres of proxy operations where the (relatively) small states like Qatar, United Arab Emitares or Israel evidently support opposing parties to these conflicts (Boms, 2017; Khatib, 2019; Phillips, 2017; Ulrichsen, 2020). There may also be certain intervening variables that were not considered in this study, but arguably affect a small state’s decision to interfere in foreign wars such as the country’s economic base (compare oil-rich lilliputians of the Gulf to the small players of the post-Soviet area) or its diasporic ties; the latter (next to scramble for coltan) seem to have motivated Rwanda’s recent decision to employ proxies in the Kivu region of its much larger neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo (Beswick, 2009, 2014; Reyntjens, 2009: 207–231). In other words, a wide variety of cases of small states’ proxy interventions offers a fertile ground for a comparative study which would allow for more robust generalizations, so hopefully, this piece of research will only be the first of many in this area.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Interviews
1. Senior adviser at the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence, Department of International Relations and Operations, Vilnius, 13 April 2021.
2. Deputy head of the Department of International Relations and Operations, Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence, phone interview, 11 May 2021.
3. Senior officer at the Training and Doctrine Command, Lithuanian Armed Forces, Vilnius, 24 May 2021.
4. Defence Policy Director, Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence, phone interview, 12 July 2021.
5. Adviser at the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence, Department of Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, Ukraine desk, Vilnius, 14 July 2021.
6. Junior officer of the Lithuanian Armed Forces serving as an adviser at the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence, Department of International Relations and Operations, Vilnius, 9 August 2021.
7. Senior officer at the Defence Staff of Lithuanian Armed Forces, Human Resources Department, phone interview, 31 August 2021.
8. Senior officer of the Lithuanian Armed Forces serving at the European External Action Service, former Lithuanian Defence Attaché to Ukraine, Kiev, 4 October 2021.