111 Crossings in a Day: Latvia Says Putin Is Waging Hybrid War on Its Eastern Flank

The number that turned the Belarus border into a military incident is not a year or a border length. It is one figure reported on a single day: 111 attempted crossings into Latvia, more than double the pace of recent weeks, and enough for Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs to call what is happening on his country's eastern seam a deliberate, state-orchestrated hybrid war ⁶¹¹.

On July 22, 2026, that pressure tipped from policing into force. Latvian soldiers fired a warning shot and used tear gas against a group of migrants trying to cross from Belarus. The Latvian military said the group "became aggressive and threw logs at security personnel," and that the migrants retreated back across the border after the shot ³¹¹. It was the most acute use of force on the line since the migrant pressure began, and it pulled the episode out of the immigration file and into the security one ⁹.

The next morning, Kulbergs went on Euronews' Europe Today and named the power he says is behind it. Putin is stepping up hybrid warfare on Latvia, the prime minister argued, "because he is losing in Ukraine" ²¹⁰. Kulbergs went further, accusing the "top level of the Russian mob" of directing the surge in attempted crossings, and framing Russia and Belarus as running a coordinated campaign to use migration as a weapon against the EU's eastern members ²⁵.

Latvia, Poland and Lithuania have all accused Minsk and Moscow of orchestrating the influx as a destabilization strategy. Both governments deny it ³⁸. The denials are the official line, and they belong in the frame.

Kulbergs' argument rests on three pieces of evidence he put on camera. First, the trend line: attempted illegal crossings have roughly doubled in recent weeks, with 111 recorded in a single day ⁶¹¹. Second, the pattern: the migrants are being deployed, in his telling, to probe border weaknesses and to escalate tension, with October's Latvian parliamentary elections giving the campaign a political target ⁷. Third, the direction: this is not a stand-alone Baltic problem but part of a wider Russian operation against EU states, run jointly with Belarus, that aims to strain NATO's eastern members from the outside ⁵.

"Because he is losing in Ukraine," Kulbergs said, "simple," and needs to divert attention ²¹⁰. The phrase frames a localized border flare-up as a downstream effect of a war several thousand kilometers to the southeast.

Latvia and Belarus share a border in the EU's northeast, and Riga has treated the line as a hybrid front for months. Latvia's authorities have logged a cumulative tally of irregular entry attempts stretching back to August 10, 2021, the long shadow of the crisis Lukashenko opened against the EU; the precise running total is truncated in the reporting file ⁴. What the file does confirm is that the current surge is the steepest on record and the first to draw a warning shot.

Several claims circulating alongside the story are not corroborated in the reporting. The figure of 173 kilometers as the shortest EU border with Belarus, the assertion that Lithuania and Estonia have sent border guard reinforcements, the existence of a NATO July 7–8 Ankara summit, NATO defense-spending rankings for 2026, and President Edgars Rinkēvičs's reported warning about testing Article 5 over the next twelve months do not appear in the sourced material. The October elections timing is the one such detail indirectly supported by reporting on the political stakes of the crisis ⁷.

Latvia's response has already moved past border guards. Soldiers are deployed in support of the frontier operation, tear gas and a live warning round are now part of the toolkit, and the file is being kept in the hybrid-security folder rather than the immigration one ³⁹. That is a categorical change in how Riga is framing the situation, and it sets up the next decision point: whether the reinforcements stay as they are, or whether NATO members treat the warning shot as a signal that the eastern flank needs more than national-level force.

For Kulbergs, the test is also domestic. With parliamentary elections in October, the border crisis is on its way to becoming a defining political issue, and the prime minister is making his reading of it — Putin, hybrid war, the Ukraine connection — the government's working theory of the case ⁷.