The Italian Insider

Russia is launching a new phase of pressure on the Baltic states. Moscow has announced its intention to appeal to the International Court of Justice over the "suppression of the rights of Russian speakers" in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In reality, this is another element of a systematic effort to build a legitimacy framework for possible intervention. Moscow’s rhetoric is standard and familiar: "language bans," "Russophobia," and "persecution of dissent." The foreign ministry pretends that negotiations "have yielded no results" and that complaints submitted to the UN and OSCE have been ignored - therefore, the Kremlin is allegedly forced to go to court. This logic of "exhausting all available means" is not a legal strategy but preparation of a narrative: every refusal of jurisdiction will be presented as proof of "Western bias" and justification for extrajudicial actions. The scheme is not new. Before the 2008 war in Georgia, Russia spent years talking about the "genocide of Ossetians," distributing passports to residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and then used the claim of "protecting Russian citizens" as a formal justification for invasion. Immediately after that war, in 2009, Medvedev signed amendments to the Law on Defense that explicitly allowed the use of the military abroad to protect Russian citizens. The Kremlin moved the concept of "protecting compatriots" from propaganda into formal law. The same pattern repeated itself in Ukraine in 2014 and was expanded in 2022 - each time using the same set of narratives: "protecting Russians," "neo-Nazism," and "genocide." Now this framework is being transferred to the Baltics while simultaneously receiving new legislative reinforcement. On May 13, 2026, the State Duma adopted, by 381 votes in favor, and on May 25 - the very same day the foreign ministry announced its intention to appeal to the ICJ - Putin signed a law allowing the use of the military abroad to protect Russian citizens from persecution by courts whose jurisdiction Moscow does not recognize. What an astonishing coincidence: two steps taken on the same day - a legal claim and expanded legal authorization for the use of force, formalized simultaneously. The Baltic situation has one fundamental difference from Georgia and Ukraine: passportization failed here. Accession to the EU and NATO in 2004 closed that window, so Moscow now appeals not to "Russian citizens" but to the legally much weaker category of "compatriots" and "Russian speakers." The role of symbolic "proof of persecution" is played by the Gaponenko case - a man sentenced in Riga to ten years in prison after speaking at a Moscow conference about the "ethnocide of Russians," while Latvian courts classified his actions as incitement of hatred and assistance to a foreign state. The weakness of the legal basis does not stop Russia - it simply shifts the focus from legal results to propaganda effect. NATO membership remains the main deterrent for Moscow. Therefore, the real goal of the campaign is to create a "gray zone" in the perception of the conflict and build an international record of an "unresolved issue concerning the rights of Russians." This objective becomes especially significant against the backdrop of April statements by the Trump administration regarding a possible U.S. withdrawal from NATO - uncertainty of this kind creates precisely the conditions under which the Kremlin’s human rights narrative becomes operationally useful. The current campaign against the Baltic states is not a diplomatic episode. It is a methodical construction of an infrastructure within which any future escalation can be presented not as aggression, but as "forced protection." This is exactly how Russia acted before.