The Weekend Intelligence: How to prepare for an invasion

The Economist. Last year, my colleague Katie Bryant was visiting her partner's family in Lithuania. In the kitchen, she found a pamphlet. Every household in the country has received one. On its cover, a cartoon of a nuclear family. Mom, dad, two kids on their laps. Big bold lettering, if war or crisis comes, what should I do? It's filled with practical advice about first aid kits and stockpiling food and having an emergency plan and so on, but it's the introduction that's revealing. As our long history and current events in the world have shown, security and independence need to be constantly defended and strengthened. It goes on to talk about how to survive the first three days until public authorities restore essential services or provide the necessary assistance. What's hinted at here is made concrete later when it mentions occupying forces. For Lithuania and the other NATO member Baltic states, for the alliance's chief, Mark Rutte, there's only one force causing concern. Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe, and we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great grandparents endured. I'm Jason Palmer, and this is the Weekend Intelligence. NATO is already a bigger club because of the war in Ukraine. Sweden and Finland fast tracked their way in after the war started. Four years in, and the worry is only growing about what Lithuanians, including Europe's defense commissioner, Andreas Kobilius, call day x. We need to remember that if day x comes and and Putin decides to test article five somewhere in the Baltic region, we shall face aggression of a Russian battle tested army, which is now much stronger than it was back in in February 2022. Katie went back to Lithuania to see what preparedness looks like today, beyond the regular forces and the NATO backstop. She spent time with the civilian army in freezing Baltic temperatures asking not how the state, but how communities and families and individuals are confronting the threat of invasion. Baravice, Waverushkos, Lapshae, Rudaniki. There are a lot of mushrooms here, you know. We have, like, beautiful forests. We have beautiful lakes. And which is your favorite mushroom? Oh, Baravicus. Oh, yeah. How come? You can. You know, it's, this mushroom, my grandfather told me when he was, like, little and he was working like a shepherd. They pick them and they were, let's say, cooking them on the fire. Just, you know, don't you don't need nothing. Just cook them for a few minutes and then you eat them. As you might be able to tell from the gunshots in the background, Mindaugas and I sadly aren't in a forest picking mushrooms. We're at an army base in Eastern Lithuania, standing in the middle of a model town. There's a stone house opposite an empty school building and a replica church. The buildings are connected by an underground tunnel. Fake casualties painted with lifelike wounds are being carried through …