This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague Anatole Leibon of the Quincy Institute about the Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,

from the Gulf of Finland to the Savaliki Grab in Poland, with Kaliningrad, a Russian possession behind them.

They're digging in. The Bloomberg report says

they're building a corridor all along their frontier with Belarus and Russia, and they mean to

fight in place. They don't mean to evacuate. They really can evacuate. Bloomberg details the whole

population in getting involved as volunteers.

Enormous expensive. But they expect to be attacked and they'll go underground and they'll fight back.

They're learning from the lessons of the early days of Ukraine. What is all this? It's about NATO taking

the Russian threat genuinely soberly and reacting.

Not about Paris, London, and Berlin, but about the Baltics' front line.

Much more of this tonight.

Here's Anatol accepting the fact of the digging in and then remarking what that

means, what it could mean. Nothing good. Here's Anatole.

Well, they're spooked, of course, because of their history and because of what happened to Ukraine.

But I myself do not think that this is actually necessary.

I mean, okay, you know, no harm in deterring the Russians.

But the fact of the matter is that, you know, Putin has stated,

and the government has stated again and again, that they have no territorial demands on the Baltic

states, that they have no plans to attack the Baltic states. And if you think about Russian

interests and strategy, I think this is perfectly credible because it's quite obvious.

I mean, everybody knows that Russian strategy now is devoted to separating the United States under Trump and the European establishments, and also dividing Europe internally between the

existing European establishments and the new populist right. Now, the one thing which would

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