With NATO leaders due in Ankara in two days, a case can be made that the Baltic states’ greatest vulnerability right now isn’t a gap in air defence or a shortfall in troop numbers — it’s the fact that Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn are not always saying the same thing in the same room.

Three capitals, three slightly different pitches

Security analysts tracking the run-up to the summit note subtle but real divergences. Lithuania has pushed hardest for permanent rather than rotational NATO troop presence. Latvia has focused its lobbying on air and missile defence gaps exposed by recent drone incursions. Estonia, meanwhile, has spent more diplomatic capital on cyber and hybrid-threat cooperation, reflecting its own experience as a frequent target of digital attacks.

Why the differences matter more than they used to

“Individually, each of these priorities is reasonable. Collectively, they let larger allies pick which Baltic request to act on and which to defer,” said Margarita Šešelgytė, director of the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University. “A unified ask is harder to ignore than three overlapping ones.”

That view is shared, with variations, by other regional security specialists. Kalev Stoicescu, a former Estonian diplomat now with the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn, argues the three states have historically done better coordinating on economic and EU matters than on defence messaging specifically, where national defence ministries tend to guard their own priorities closely.

The 1989 Baltic Way — the human chain linking Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn — is often invoked by officials as proof that coordinated action across the three states is possible when the stakes are clear enough. Whether that same instinct extends to modern defence diplomacy remains, for now, an open question.

The counter-argument

Not everyone agrees fragmentation is the core problem. Some officials in Riga privately argue that having three distinct asks actually broadens the coalition of NATO members willing to engage, since different allies have different comparative advantages to offer — air defence hardware from the United States, cyber cooperation from the Netherlands, ground troops from Germany.

What unity would look like in practice

Šešelgytė’s preferred fix is procedural rather than dramatic: a standing joint Baltic position paper, agreed before each major NATO or EU security meeting, that ranks shared priorities rather than listing each country’s separate wish list. Something close to this exists informally through the Baltic Assembly, but analysts argue it lacks the binding weight of a jointly agreed, publicly stated position. The stakes of that framing are rising: with Russia’s defence-industrial output still expanding despite sanctions, and hybrid incidents — drone incursions, GPS jamming, undersea cable disruptions — becoming near-monthly occurrences along the eastern flank, the region’s officials increasingly describe 2026 as a year when perception in Brussels and Washington matters almost as much as capability on the ground.

Whether that kind of coordination materialises before Ankara is unlikely at this stage — this week’s rundown of what each capital wants from the summit makes clear the asks remain distinct rather than unified. But as the region’s officials themselves acknowledge, the argument for closer alignment will only grow louder the longer Baltic security is treated, in Šešelgytė’s words, as “three small problems rather than one shared one.”