Masked gunmen invade Latvia – journalist speaks of new “green men”

This incident is worrying politicians and security forces on the NATO eastern border: According to Latvian Interior Minister Jānis Dombrava and the Latvian armed forces, a group of armed unknown people tried to smuggle around 20 migrants across the Belarusian-Latvian border. The incident happened at the beginning of October. There is said to have been a confrontation with Latvian security forces.

Interior Minister Dombrava said the suspected intruders were initially pushed back. Meanwhile, the Latvian armed forces were threatened by the migrants' three companions on the Belarusian side. In addition, the migrant group was actively chased towards Latvia.

Later, masked people entered Latvian territory again. According to the Russian exile media “stories,” they damaged a distribution box there and stole cameras before returning to Belarus.

The Latvian side sees the incident as part of hybrid threats against the EU and NATO external borders.

At the beginning of October, border guard chief Guntis Pujats suspected that the masked people were not members of the Belarusian services, but rather members of organized crime who had taken advantage of the goodwill of the authorities in Minsk.

Later, a group called “Black Russians” (“Chernye Rusy”) claimed responsibility for the incident in a video statement on Telegram. There they claimed that the incident showed that NATO and the West were weak and had nothing to counter the alliance of Russia and Belarus.

Experts quoted by the Latvian broadcaster LSM believed that connections to Russian or Belarusian security services were possible. However, no evidence of this was provided. In any case, the background is difficult to verify: many details are based on the group's self-portrayals, while independent evidence of their identity, motives and possible connections to state actors is still missing.

The Belarusian exiled journalist Dmitry Halko on the LSM channel drew a connection to the “little green men” that Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin had sent to Crimea as cover soldiers without official Russian insignia. The journalist spoke of a “kind of straw man structure”.

Latvia - like Lithuania and Poland - has repeatedly accused the authoritarian Belarus of organizing migrants from crisis regions to the EU's external border. According to the border guard, a total of almost 12,000 people have been prevented from crossing the border illegally this year.

In order to curb the number of irregular border crossers, Latvia recently launched “Operation Werewolf” to secure its eastern border. Border guards, state police, armed forces and secret services work more closely together. Radar systems and drones are also increasingly being used in the border area to detect illegal border crossings. The operation was extended by the government in Riga until the end of the year.