We are presenting the seventh edition of the National Threat Assessment prepared by the State Security Department of the Republic of Lithuania and Defence Intelligence and Security Service under the Ministry of National Defence of the Republic of Lithuania.
Source State Security Department
By performing the tasks set by the national State Defence Council, every day we analyse and assess both external and internal threats to our state and society. The constantly changing environment poses challenges from various types of hostile actors to us – be it foreign countries, their armed forces, intelligence and security services, various economic actors, state-sponsored media propaganda or radicalized individuals, prepared for terrorist attacks.
It has been a long time since Lithuania and our transatlantic Allies experienced such a strong pressure from authoritarian states. Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s orchestrated migration crisis has become a significant challenge to our state. The self-proclaimed leader of Belarus demonstrates his willingness to further exacerbate the conflict with his Western neighbours. An aggressive Chinese policy will increase economic, cyber and information threats to Lithuania. Meanwhile, Russia is and will remain the greatest and potentially existential threat to Lithuania and other countries of the region. By threatening to invade Ukraine and spark a conflict in Europe, Russia seeks to force the West to acknowledge its right to determine political choices of other independent states to decide on the ways how to ensure national and regional security. Moscow is also taking advantage of instability generated by Lukashenka and together with Beijing further challenging the West.
Our goal is to inform the readers, no matter whether they live in Lithuania or any other country, that hostile spy agencies might attempt to use their knowledge, connections, manipulate their personal interests or weaknesses – all in order to persuade them to betray their own country. In addition, hostile intelligence seeks to hack our devices and to mislead and disintegrate our society by spreading lies. Therefore, we expect that the awareness of hostile intentions and capabilities will help to critically assess the reality and will enable us to become more resilient on society and individual levels.
It comes as no surprise that a majority of daily intelligence work is classified and cannot be disclosed. Consequently, some of our assessments do not reveal the most sensitive details and thus may sound sketchy. Nevertheless, this review presents the essence of threats and challenges that Lithuania and other allied countries are facing and represents closely coordinated work of Lithuanian intelligence community
Read full National Threat Assessment report in English here.
