Warships escorted vessels carrying allied military equipment through Latvian territorial waters and into port during Lion Protector 26, the Joint Expeditionary Force exercise now running across Northern Europe, the Latvian Ministry of Defence stated.
The exercise began on 3 August and runs until 12 October, covering Northern Europe, the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea region. Its opening activity, designated Baltic Express, is built around the rapid coordination and movement of forces across the region.
Rapid movement is a key part of credible deterrence. 🚢🚛🛡️#BalticExpress demonstrates how @JEFnations can coordinate and move forces across Northern Europe, strengthening military mobility, interoperability and readiness in support of #NATO’s deterrence and defence.… https://t.co/ahvmCBSzp5
— NATO Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum – JFCBS (@NATOJFCBS) August 12, 2026
According to the Latvian ministry, their Armed Forces worked with the JEF to escort the vessels safely, oversee their entry into port and handle the unloading of equipment and its onward movement to deployment locations.
NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum said rapid movement is a key part of credible deterrence, and that Baltic Express demonstrates how JEF nations can coordinate and move forces across Northern Europe, strengthening military mobility, interoperability and readiness.
Moving heavy equipment into the Baltic states is the problem the exercise exists to solve. The region is connected to the rest of NATO by sea and by the Suwalki gap, the stretch of Polish and Lithuanian border running between Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and reinforcement in a crisis would depend heavily on ports and the roads and railways leading inland from them.
Baltic subsea cables and pipelines have been damaged repeatedly since 2023, including the Balticconnector gas pipeline and several telecommunications cables, and NATO stood up Baltic Sentry in January 2025 to increase patrolling in response. Suspected shadow fleet tankers have been detained by regional navies, and GPS interference across the region has been attributed by several governments to Russian sources.
The Joint Expeditionary Force is a British-led grouping of ten Northern European nations: the UK, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. It operates outside the NATO command structure but is designed to complement it, allowing a smaller group of countries with common interests in the High North and the Baltic to act faster than an alliance of thirty-two members can.
Lion Protector 26 covers the maritime, air and land domains from the Arctic to the Baltic. Latvia describes it as complementing NATO’s vigilance and deterrence measures while strengthening the ability of participating nations to deploy forces rapidly.
With Sweden and Finland now in NATO the defence of the Baltic Sea suddenly has a new importance and it also gives NATO and JEF an entire new strategy to attack and pressure Russia with.
Kaliningrad can be easily isolated and the local population will likely be calling for independence with in five minutes of a war being declared and St Petersburg would come with in artillery range and serious threat of NATO ground forces in the first few days of a conflict. All while Russia has to defend Murmansk and its single road and rail connection to the rest of Russia.
From a NATO perspective defence of the Baltics now seems like not only a realistic prospect but a desirable theatre to engage Russian forces in.