The Baltic states fear a Russian invasion. They faced the same threat a century ago and failed to stop it. Historian Alexey Uvarov explains why the region could not defend itself against Stalin.

Historian Alexey Uvarov traces how Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland tried and failed to build a joint defense bloc after World War I, holding fifteen conferences between 1919 and 1925 without producing a working alliance.

The 1920 Bulduri conference produced a draft agreement that Lithuania refused to sign and Poland and Finland never ratified, largely because Poland's seizure of Vilnius made a Warsaw-Kaunas alliance unthinkable. A narrower 1922 Warsaw pact fell apart when Finland's parliament refused to ratify it, and only Estonia and Latvia managed a full bilateral defense treaty in 1923.

The piece connects this history to current warnings from Western intelligence about a growing Russian threat to the Baltic region, as Finland and Sweden join NATO and the U.S. presses Europe to spend more on its own defense.

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