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Canadian commander says NATO battle group in Latvia could beat back Russian attack
RIGA, Latvia — The Canadian officer commanding a NATO battle group in Latvia says Russian forces would be routed if they dared launch an attack against Canadian troops and their allies stationed in the Baltic country on Russia’s western border.
“I think we’d win by a fair margin,” Lt.-Col. Jesse van Eijk, head of the Enhanced Forward Presence Latvia battle group, said in an interview Wednesday.
The threat is constant in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and on Tuesday tensions mounted when a missile strike killed two people in Poland, another NATO member. There were initially fears the missile had been fired by Russia, but Poland said Wednesday it was probably launched by air defences in neighbouring Ukraine.
Van Eijk spoke to The Canadian Press in his modest office in a temporary building at Camp Adazi, the battle group base in the middle of a forest about a 45-minute drive from Riga, the Latvian capital.