Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda on Sunday asked NATO to “consolidate” the alliance’s eastern flank if the leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, settles in Belarus, AFP reports. Agerpres.

The leader of the Baltic country, which borders Russia and Belarus and is hosting the NATO summit next month, said this after a meeting of the Security Council of Lithuania dedicated to the failed rebellion of the Wagner group against the Russian military leadership.

After Prigozhin ordered his troops, which had arrived a few hundred kilometers from Moscow on Saturday, to withdraw to temporary bases in Ukraine, saying he did not want Russian bloodshed, Moscow announced that Wagner’s commander would leave Russia for Belarus and would not be charges have been filed.

“If Prigozhin or part of Wagner’s group are in Belarus without clear plans and intentions, it simply means that we need to further strengthen our security on the eastern borders,” the Lithuanian president explained.

“Today I am talking not only about Lithuania, but, of course, about NATO as a whole,” Nauseda said.

He also said the Vilnius government would allocate additional resources to intelligence services to assess “political and security aspects in Belarus.”

Like many Western politicians, the Lithuanian president believes that after the armed uprising of the Wagner group, Russian President Vladimir Putin will face even greater difficulties in the coming months than those caused by the war in Ukraine. “The king is empty,” Nauseda remarked, referring to Putin.

Politicians and commentators who would like to remove Vladimir Putin from power see Prigozhin’s rebellion as a weakening of the Kremlin leader’s position. However, the success of this uprising could lead Russia to a leadership more hostile to the West than Putin’s leadership.