The UK is complicit in money laundering Russian dirty money the rest of world knows it...
As is the US, and every other Western democracy. Who do you think has been driving up real estate prices in the most desirable areas of the biggest cities? Suspicious Activities Reports are a joke. To be direct, they exist to catch small-time crooks and drug dealers.
Interesting. Putin will have acknowledged this as a possibility, yet still pressed ahead. That being the case, I think he will go further - otherwise why risk the pipeline?
The Baltics at a minimum have to be in contention now.
He won't attack them directly...unless they elect to withdraw from NATO or NATO decides to remove them. Either is a possibility.
If it comes to an invasion, reality is that the resulting war under Article 5 largely won't be fought there, as things stand. NATO's security guarantee will mean that the alliance will fight to avenge a whole bunch of corpses. That will concern a lot of voters in the Baltics, and Putin knows how to throw money around to stoke those kinds of fears. I can imagine a world where the Baltics, one by one, are run by an elected pro-Russian government that withdraws from NATO. That would more or less ensure that future governments in those states would have to be pro-Russian, which solves Putin's problem without a fight.
With that said, Putin would still have to pacify Ukraine first to apply that kind of pressure. That probably won't be easy. I don't think Putin is fool enough to give a "Mission Accomplished" speech after knocking over Kyiv, or open up a second front while dealing with an insurgency.
There are no formal provisions in the North Atlantic Treaty for the removal of a member, for reasons that made sense at the time it was signed. States can still be kicked out under Article 60 of the Vienna Convention, which governs international treaties, for a material breach. The probable pretext here would be a violation of Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty. To quote:
"The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty."
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were invited to join because they are staunch defenders of the principles of the Treaty. Whether they contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area is very debatable. It could be argued that, at present, they are active military liabilities that contribute little to collective security. The opposite could be argued if Sweden and Finland became signatories, and permitted the alliance to station a bunch of planes there and use their ports and territorial waters to do as it pleases in the Baltic. That permits neutering Putin's fleet stationed in Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and closing passage to the North Sea without protest, which would let the alliance move stuff in quantity from other ports on the Baltic Sea at will.
Losing any one of the Baltics then jeopardizes that situation, in which they are both more defensible and far more worth defending.
