Suspicious mines: Putin-proofing the Baltics

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Our correspondent takes a trip to Baltimore, one of those American cities with a past reputation for violent crime. But recent statistics show a dramatic national decline in violence. What are Baltimore and other cities at last getting right? And our culture correspondent and a familiar voice looks at a mammoth new biography of Mark Twain. It argues that the author jump started celebrity culture and single handedly invented a way of being American in the world and on the page.

But first.

I'm standing on the border between Lithuania and Belarus in the middle of a beautiful forest of fir trees and pines with the birds singing on a spring day.

David Rennie, our Geopolitics editor, has been spending some time in the Baltics.

But right in the middle there is a huge metal fence with razor wire on the top and then beyond that still on the Lithuanian side, coil after coil of razor wire in a thick mass to stop people even getting to the fence. And cameras every few meters on posts guarded with sharp spikes against climbing to keep a watch on what would be the front line if Russia ever tried to test NATO and the European Union at this border with Lithuania.

David, you're back in the UK After Enjoying the birdsong of Lithuania. Tell me it's not just Lithuania that's beefing up its borders, is it?

No. So every European country that borders Russia clearly has a real headache that Russia has shown what it's capable of. And I think nowhere is this felt as acutely as in three Baltic republics. So Lithuania, but its neighbors, Estonia and Latvia. And there's a couple of obvious reasons why they are extremely paranoid about Russian aggression. One is that they spent decades under occupation by the Soviet Union, their independence snuffed out, which they only got back after 1990. And they're also really small. Between them it's like 6.1 million people. And if the Russians made it across their borders, then they wouldn't have anywhere to run.

And David, you've told us about wires and fences, but what else are they doing then to ramp up their defences.

So they're not trying to do everything themselves. They get vital help from other larger NATO partners who provide fighter jets, like an air force, borrowed warships to help them patrol the Baltic Sea. They have German, British, other forces on their ground as Tritwa forces. And so they know that they have to do really brutal indeed old fashioned things to stop invaders coming across their border. And that has led them to rethink international obligations that they entered into when they first became independent countries and wanted to show how exemplary they were as Western democracies. So they signed up to international conventions. Lithuania signed up to one that banned landmines along with its neighbours in the Baltics, and then a few years later signed up to one that bans cluster munitions. And those are genuinely horrible weapons. They scatter grenade sized bomblets over a wide area and if they don't all go off, they can kill civilians for years after war, just as landmines clearly can kill civilians years after war. So it's really striking how in Lithuania they admit that these are terrible, terrible weapons, but they have just left the Cluster Nations Convention and they have announced that they are starting the six month long legal process along with their neighbours Estonia and Latvia, but also Finland and Poland, to leave the Landmines Convention in half a year's time to be allowed to lay landmines on their border.

It's a huge about turn, as you say, to think of laying landmines on their border. Are Lithuanians worried about this?

They say that it is a bad choice rather than the worst choice which is being invaded. And it's remarkable how often in Lithuania people will mention some of the very worst massacres of civilians at the beginning of the Invasion of Ukraine, say in that suburb of Bucha near Kiev, people will mention that and say that could be our children, that could be our grandparents. And so they're doing this with very heavy hearts and they know exactly just how dangerous landmines are.

Even in Lithuania we are still, for.

Example, demining from the Second World War. The forests, fields, there are places and we have annual plans actually of doing that.

Carols Alexe is the vice Minister of Defence in Lithuania and he was just saying there that the country is still clearing mines left over from the First World War and the Second World War. And Lithuania is also co lead of a multinational coalition which is already supplying its neighbour Ukraine with demining equipment and has promised to provide even more after the end of the war.

We understand that we and the NATO and the European Union, but this shows the result in this atmosphere right now.

That we are living this psychological, informational.

As well as space is also very important.

So on the one hand in the Defence Ministry they will talk about landmines have got more sophisticated. You can have ones that blow themselves up after a few days or weeks or months and they'll also have very clearly mapped minefields. But they also want to make clear that though they are withdrawing from these conventions and they know that that is a pretty shocking step to some other countries, that they are absolutely still committed to being good players in international law. It's just that they are on the border with an aggressive much, much larger neighbour.

So where would these landmines go?

So they have a border with Belarus which they regard as pretty much as bad as Russia. In fact, there's a huge motorway sign over the highway that leads from the capital of Lithuania towards that border that, that says how many kilometers is to Kyiv? Because they want to send a signal of solidarity with Ukraine. But it points out that it's only 187km to the capital of Belarus, Minsk, and then it says in brackets occupied by the Kremlin. Because their point is that Belarus is now essentially a client state of Vladimir Putin's empire. They also have a separate border with a chunk of Russia, Kaliningrad, which is on the other side of Lithuania there sandwiched between the Belarus on the one side and this exclave, this kind of separate chunk of Russia on the other side that's a leftover from history. And so to this day, Russia has the right to send trains and cargo across Lithuania to Kaliningrad, which is a pretty scary prospect for them.

And just tell me which border you went to.

So I went to a border which was really close to the capital, Vilnius, which is actually the border with Belarus, to Lavoriskes, and. And there it was, one of six border crossings into Belarus. Now, most of them closed. That one was closed last year. And it's pretty dramatic. So you go through these beautiful, peaceful pine woods where to this day, locals can apply to the border guards for permits to go and forage for mushrooms in mushroom season. But there is this corridor of cleared ground slashed like a scar through the forest, soft sand patched so that you can see footprints, and they see a deer track and moose and the occasional bear ambling around the fence. And then you have this very, very large fence reinforced with coils of serious razor wire. And the land crossing at Lavoriskes has a big red sign that says to Lithuanian citizens, do not risk your safety. Do not travel to Belarus. You may fail to come back.

David, it's an extraordinary scene that you're painting, and I want to know what is the future of treaties like the Ottawa Convention on Landmines if all these liberal countries feel they need to pull out?

So there is a really painful debate underway. Actually. The UK was really in the lead of the Cluster Munitions Convention back in the days when Gordon Brown was Prime minister. And you've seen parliamentary debates in Britain saying maybe looking back, that first landmine ban treaty, which was a late 90s artifact, and then 2008 when they did the cluster Munitions Convention, we were naive. Maybe governments, including Britain's, thought that we had gone through the end of history. That phrase that everyone was talking about, the Soviet Union, had disappeared. It looked like we'd won the Cold War, that you could imagine that your army was there to provide peacekeeping, but was never going to fight a great power conflict. And so there is a sense that countries that signed up partly because they wanted to set a good example to places in, say, Africa or in Asia, don't use land mines. Because, look, we, the world's richest, supposedly responsible democracies, have also abjured them. There is this argument that you hear in some countries now that that moment is over and we need to accept that we're back into a much nastier, much older feeling world of great power conflict.

Sobering stuff. David, thank you for talking to me.

Thank. You.

I recently visited Baltimore, a city of Maryland which is infamous for crime, especially if you may have watched The Wire, a TV show from about 20 years ago.

Daniel Knowles is our Midwest correspondent.

If you go to West Baltimore now, you might think it still looks a bit like the Wire. There are men hanging around selling Drugs. It can seem a little sketchy, but it's actually a lot better than it was not that long ago. I spoke to a woman called Asato who lives in West Baltimore. You came out here by yourself?

You didn't bring like, one of your friends or anything?

No, I'm surprisingly relaxed. Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But no eyes on the body.

No, exactly. Like, I've been to sketchier places than Baltimore. I've spent time in, like, South Sudan. She told me that her neighborhood has changed. So who's hanging out on this street? I see kids.

Yeah, it's a bunch of kids.

I told you. Every house I hear have like a.

Family that live in it. Grown, you know, adults, elderly, children. It's mainly women around right now.

Are there problems with, like, drug dealing or anything like that? Nope, not around here. People living their lives. This year there have been less than 50 homicides in the city, which is down for a third over the same period last year. And that was already Baltimore's lowest number of homicides in 10 years. They had 199 in 2024. If you go to Johns Hopkins Hospital, they haven't admitted a child injured by a gun for months. A doctor there told me they used to have one at least once a month. And it's not just Baltimore. Violence is falling across America.

So talk me through the fall. Let's put some numbers to it.

There's a company called, ah, Datalytics, which gathers crime data from police departments all over the US and they reckon that 2025 may be on track for the lowest murder rate since. Since the 1960s. And if you look at city by city, you know, Baltimore has had this almost halving of its murder rate. But it's not the only place. Philadelphia's murder rate is down by more than half since 2021.

And so let's get into why that might be. These are fairly striking numbers.

If you look at the 30 cities with the highest homicide rates in the U.S. 25 of them have seen falls over the past year. So crime's falling almost everywhere. So if you talk to people on the street, you definitely hear one thing that's changed is how the drugs market is working. So I spoke to Ray Kelly, who's a police reform activist in West Baltimore.

From a street level, the availability, the cheapness of fentanyl has made a lot of street open air drug activity unappealing. There's no money in it. There's like, a lot of people that feel like it's more profitable, which is what drives the drug trade to actually get a job than to actually risk your freedom and your life.

But that's definitely not the only thing that's going on. There's also been a lot of change in how Baltimore does policing and a lot of work put into violence interruption in the city.

What does that mean in practice? Violence interruption?

If you go back to 2020 and you remember the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter protest after that, a lot of the surge in violence followed that. And in the years since, what the federal government did under Joe Biden was poured money into what's called community violence interruption, which is this model where you hire a bunch of people who try and target the young men most likely to get involved in violence, most likely to get into a shooting. And the way that's worked in Baltimore is that you have these two groups, Yap Yap is one and Roka is the other. And they work quite closely with the police and they take in young men who might be at risk of getting into a fight, of using a gun, and try and give them therapy and all sorts of job training and various other things to stop them getting involved in crime. And that goes hand in hand with police reform. And there's this model that they've come up with, which is a kind of carrot and stick. On the one hand, you get to go and work with ROCA or whatever. On the other hand, if you don't, the police will come and arrest you. What people really think is working in Baltimore, why Baltimore has had these much bigger declines of violence than a lot of cities in the US Is that they think this model's working quite well.

And you said this is actually the fruition of Biden era policies. Obviously, the Trump administration has different thoughts on where federal money should go. How does that figure in under the.

Trump administration, a lot of this community violence interruption funding is already being cut in Baltimore. Roca, which was a charity I visited, has seen $1 million of its funding cut locally and 4 million nationally. And at the same time, you're seeing federal law enforcement being redirected away from violent crime and towards immigration enforcement. A third of FBI officers are now working on immigration enforcement and police reform, which is the other big part of is something that Donald Trump is really not keen on. He has stopped enforcing federal consent decrees, and he's instead said that cops who are accused of wrongdoing should get pro bono legal advice. So that's got a lot of people worried as well, in the sense that.

The downward trend might flatten out, might reverse altogether.

A lot of criminologists don't tend to think that federal policy matters that much in terms of levels of violent crime. But what Donald Trump is doing, if it is going to cause it to go up again, he's kind of doing everything that the federal government can do. On the other hand, though, one of the positives about lower crime is that the ones who have less violence, that can kind of become self reinforcing when you have pure homicides. Homicide detectives have more time to solve each one. Police who are on the streets have more time to go and check in on businesses or to respond to more minor crimes. So the hope is that these lower crime rates, lower violence rates will stay sticky despite what's happening at the federal level. And I kind of saw that myself on a, on a ride out with the police in Baltimore. Is that. That's not a bullet hole on that door, is it? No, no, it's just something smashed it.

Smashed it with a bad oar.

We've got another bystander.

We're going to have one of the.

G. When I was five, five number.

One males, young, one of them's gonna.

Have a white mask on everybody with black sweatpants.

One thing I saw was two police officers spent a good half an hour talking to a woman who had called the police because she was in an argument with her mobile phone company. And I said to the police, it's quiet. Which they told me never say, but it was.

Daniel, thanks very much for your time.

Jason, thank you for having me.

The study where Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn and a number of other works where he had his most productive 20 years is an octagonal Glaston study that his wife's family built for him. And it's an exceptionally lovely piece of Victorian architecture, very symmetrical, but it's also, by modern standards, small and plain and austere. And those are three things that Mark Twain's life just absolutely was not.

John Fasman is our senior culture correspondent.

Twain is the subject of an enormous new biography by Ron Chernow. Chernow had previously done well regarded biographies of J.P. morgan, of George Washington, and I think of most note to modern readers Alexander Hamilton, a book that was used as the basis for Lin Manuel Miranda's hugely successful musical. Twain is the first literary figure who Chernow has chosen to profile. And I suspect he did this because Twain just lived an enormous 19th century life of the type that writers don't really live anymore. He just left a copy, copious amount of original source material and he's a wonderful fun Writer. His writing holds up now in a way that a lot of 19th century authors do not. So I think it's this combination of his unique status as the voice of America's 19th century and just the sheer amount of stuff Turner had to work with that made him an appealing subject. Mark Twain was not his birth name, that was his pen name. He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, and he grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which was right on the banks of the Mississippi. He was the sixth of seven children. He was not a well child, but he was one of only a few of the children to survive into adulthood. His father was anxious, stern, and apparently utterly humorless. He was trained as a magistrate judge, but had a string of failed businesses and sort of lived with this weight of successive failure his whole life. His mother was pious, but very quick witted. Twain seems to have got his interest in humor from her. And like Abraham Lincoln, who was not a contemporary of Twain's but had a similar life, he didn't really have much formal education. He left school in his early teens to go to work. But what he lacked in education he met up for with ambition. He read a lot. He was a tremendous autodidact, and he really made it his mission to be out in the world as much as possible. As a young man he worked as a printer, and then he accompanied his brother out to what was then the Nevada Territory before it was a state. And so he seems always to have had a real taste for adventure. His upbringing introduced him to two subjects that would define his career. The first one obviously was the Mississippi river itself. To him, it was a symbol of freedom, it was a symbol of liberty. It features heavily in Tom Sawyer and Huck, his two most famous novels. And he wrote a wonderful memoir of his time as a riverboat pilot. The other subject that his upbringing introduced him to was enslaved Americans. And at that time, Missouri, when he grew up, was a slave state. His father owned and rented people. His mother defended individual enslaved people against mistreatment, but she had no time for abolitionism itself. But Twain always had a real sympathy for black Americans. He enjoyed spending time in what was called the Negro quarter of his father's farm. He liked listening to people tell stories. And he became, over the course of his life, an ardent opponent of racial discrimination in any form. That abhorrence for slavery seemed to have inspired his most famous book, commonly called Huck Finn. The full name is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It's a mainstay in American Schools. And I think I read it in middle school. I reread it while I was working on this column and it really holds up beautifully. In a preface to this book, he quipped, persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished. Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. But of course, it's a very moral and heavily plot driven book. Ernest Hemingway said that all American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. And I think what he meant by that is that Twain in this book figured out a way to be American on the page that no one had figured out before. A lot of American literature either sort of looked toward Europe as an example or was self consciously didactic and concerned with bettering its readers. Twain obviously was concerned with telling a good story. And as I said, the story has a profound moral argument against slavery. The character of Jim is perhaps the first fully realized, complex black character ever written by a white author. And you contrast Jim's dignity and thoughtfulness to and decency with the panoply of white Southern grotesques. They meet on land and you see an argument made through the characters that discrimination really deforms the people who practice it. The biography itself is immense. It's almost 1200 pages. And I can see why Chernow did this. He wanted to paint a complete life of Twain, and he just had an immense amount of information to work with. To me, it felt at times like I was being overwhelmed by extraneous detail. I really did not need to know how the young Mark Twain cared for his hair. I did not need to know his opinion on street cleaning in the city of Buffalo. And I think by about page 700 even the most devoted Twainiac will wish Mr. Chernow had a slightly more vigorous editor. But the book is worth reading. It's a portrait of an author who is short, sure of himself and his gifts, even while he was working as a steamboat captain in a printer's office. And it's a wonderful portrait of America in its unruly adolescence, before it became a superpower, when it was still not quite sure of itself and it was coming together. So the book is quite an undertaking, but I think it's a worthwhile one. It's one you should find time for this summer if you have any interest in American literature.

That's all for this episode of the intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.