Beyond Border Control: How Latvia Is Militarising Its Eastern Frontier

For years, the eastern European migration crisis could be treated primarily as a problem of border management. That assumption is becoming harder to sustain.

The tunnel discovered in August represents a different type of challenge. Building underground infrastructure across an international border requires preparation, resources and a degree of organisation that goes beyond spontaneous attempts to evade border controls. For Latvian authorities, it fits a wider pattern of what they describe as state-directed hybrid pressure from Russia and Belarus.

Since 2021, Belarus has been accused by the Baltic states of organising migrant routes towards Lithuania, Poland and Latvia as a means of political coercion. The political backdrop has included EU sanctions and Baltic support for Ukrainian sovereignty and Belarusian opposition movements. What was initially a pressure campaign based on the movement of people has progressively acquired a security dimension.

Latvia's answer is therefore no longer limited to stopping people at crossing points.

Operation “Vilkatis” combines mobile checkpoints, road inspections, expanded radar, thermal and acoustic sensing, and surveillance from drones, helicopters and aircraft along the 456-kilometre frontier with Russia and Belarus. The State Border Guard and State Police are operating alongside the National Armed Forces, turning what would normally be a law-enforcement task into a joint security mission.

That integration matters because hybrid operations are designed precisely to exploit institutional boundaries. A border incident may begin as illegal migration, become an intelligence problem, involve unmanned aircraft and then spill into military and diplomatic territory. Treating each episode separately risks missing the common strategic pressure.

The tunnel changes the tactical equation

Latvia has already invested heavily in physical border protection. A 280-kilometre fence along its Russian border was completed by the end of 2025 at an initial cost of €378 million, while work continues on the 173-kilometre Belarusian section.

Yet physical barriers are only effective against the methods they are designed to stop.

The tunnel demonstrates the problem starkly. When pressure shifts underground, border security becomes an intelligence and surveillance challenge rather than simply a matter of fencing and patrols. Detecting movement that takes place outside ordinary lines of sight requires sensors, aerial surveillance and the ability to combine information across agencies.

This is one reason the Latvian response is likely to have consequences well beyond the immediate incident. The government has said the heightened measures will remain in force through the end of the year. What might once have been treated as an emergency deployment is consequently becoming part of a sustained operating model.

The same logic is visible in Latvia's cooperation with European and regional partners. Frontex has deployed 56 officers from 15 member states, equipped with all-terrain vehicles and mobile surveillance systems. Personnel from Lithuania, Estonia and Finland have joined Latvian patrols.

For the Baltic states, this is not simply solidarity in a crisis. It is practical interoperability at a frontier where the distinction between national and collective security is increasingly blurred.

When a border incident reaches the sky

The most consequential sign of that blurring came on August 14, when NATO Baltic Air Policing fighters intercepted and shot down an uncrewed aerial vehicle that violated Latvian airspace near Rugāji after coming from Belarus.

A drone crossing a border presents a fundamentally different escalation risk from an irregular migration attempt. It places an incident involving a neighbouring state directly into the realm of airspace security and military response.

The sequence is significant because it shows how quickly apparently separate forms of pressure can converge. On the ground, Latvia was confronting an engineered underground crossing. In the air, NATO aircraft were responding to an unauthorised drone. At the same time, Latvia's civilian digital infrastructure was dealing with a cyber intrusion.

None of these incidents needs to be treated as a conventional military attack to create military consequences.

That is the central difficulty for countries on NATO's eastern flank. Hybrid pressure can remain below the threshold of open warfare while repeatedly forcing governments to deploy capabilities normally associated with national defence. The result is a gradual militarisation of the response without a formal declaration that the country is at war.

The cyber front is part of the same problem

The cyberattack against Latvia's national car registry, CSDD, adds another layer. The intrusion compromised historical payment receipt data before Latvia's national cybersecurity incident-response institution, CERT.LV, remediated it by August 13.

The target was civilian administrative infrastructure rather than a military system. That is precisely why it matters.

A hybrid campaign does not need to disable a defence ministry to create pressure. Attacks on public databases, transport systems or administrative services can consume government resources, expose vulnerabilities and test how quickly institutions can recover. When such activity occurs alongside pressure at the physical border and an airspace incident, the security challenge becomes one of resilience across the state rather than protection of a single installation.

Latvia's decision to place multiple agencies under a common crisis-management structure reflects that reality. The Crisis Management Center of the State Chancellery is coordinating Operation “Vilkatis”, bringing together organisations with very different traditional responsibilities.

The institutional change may prove more important than any individual patrol or checkpoint.

The price of a permanent frontline

Latvia is also attaching a long-term financial commitment to the new security environment. Prime Minister Andris Kuļbergs has pledged that the country will spend at least 5% of GDP on defence from 2027.

That is a substantial shift in the meaning of border security. Once surveillance networks, military deployments, air policing and allied personnel become persistent requirements, the costs cannot be treated as temporary emergency expenditure.

Latvia has already indicated that it may seek billions of euros in EU funding for border protection, with media reports putting the potential request at as much as $7 billion. The combination of national defence spending and European financing points towards a broader question for the EU: how much of the eastern border should be financed and organised as a collective security asset rather than as infrastructure belonging solely to the member state where it stands?

The answer will shape more than Latvia's fence lines. It will influence how European governments allocate resources between conventional military capabilities, border infrastructure, surveillance technology and civilian resilience.

For Latvia, however, the direction is already becoming clearer. The eastern border is no longer being managed as a fixed administrative boundary where threats are expected to arrive through identifiable crossing points.

It is being treated as an operating environment in which a tunnel can emerge below ground, a drone can enter from the air and a cyberattack can strike a civilian database - all while the state must maintain enough capacity to respond without allowing every incident to become a military escalation.